SONIC SIGNATURES

The unique sound worlds of Salvatore Sciarrino and Kaija Saariaho.

- ALEX ROSS

The Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, whose austerely sensuous opera “Venere e Adone” had its première on May 28th, at Staatsoper Hamburg, has long possessed his own inviolable sonic world. Born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1947, he is largely self-taught as a composer and at the age of fifteen was already winning notice at Italian new-music festivals. One of his earliest published scores, the Sonata for Two Pianos, from 1966, begins with softly sweeping gestures across the white keys, like the rapid strokes of a superfine brush. In keeping with the hectic spirit of the nineteen-sixties, Sciarrino dissolved conventional classical forms into atomized activity, but his exquisite touch, his lepidopterist’s regard for the slightest fluttering sound, set him apart from his thunderous avant-garde colleagues. Five decades on, he remains a musical loner, tending his own strange garden.

“Venere e Adone,” or “Venus and Adonis,” begins, like many Sciarrino works, at the edge of silence. A ghostly note gleams and fades on the clarinet; violin strings are plucked woodenly at the bridge; a bass drum thrums; and the violas play an ethereal squiggle of a melody. The initial dynamics are pianissimo or pianississimo—as quiet as possible or quieter than that. The clarinet note is marked, in characteristic fashion, with a diminuendo to nothing. Sciarrino loves sounds that emerge and fade like breaths or breezes. You often find yourself in a sparsely but exotically populated natural environment, full of rustlings, rumblings, twitterings, quick cries. Your ears have to adjust to the acoustical reduction: you are groping around a darkened room.