Bussotti: Complete Music for Guitar Alberto Mesirca

• Sylvano Bussotti (1931 - 2021): Ermafrodito Mythological Fantasy for Guitar:
• 1Bussotti: Ermafrodito Mythological Fantasy for Guitar12:01
• Ultima Rara (Pop Song):
• 2Bussotti: Ultima Rara (Pop Song)07:20
• Giacchì lu tempu rigidu by Don Ciccio Guëli:
• 3Bussotti: "Giacchì lu tempu rigidu" by Don Ciccio Guëli00:46
• Popolaresca (Based on the Poem by Don Ciccio Guëli):
• 4Bussotti: Popolaresca (Based on the Poem by Don Ciccio Guëli)01:50
• Rara (Eco Sierologico):
• 5Bussotti: Rara (Eco Sierologico)07:39
• Tramontana (From "Lorenzaccio", Act III, 9th scene, Minnelied, part B - Taken from "Ninon" by F. P. Tosti) - Tr. Alberto Mesirca:
• 6Bussotti: Tramontana (From "Lorenzaccio", Act III, 9th scene, Minnelied, part B - Taken from "Ninon" by F. P. Tosti) - Tr. Alberto Mesirca03:03
• Nuvola Barocca:
• 7Bussotti: Nuvola Barocca05:14
• A piece for Guitar by Toru Takemitsu (For the 60th Birthday of Sylvano Bussotti):
• 8Bussotti: A piece for Guitar by Toru Takemitsu (For the 60th Birthday of Sylvano Bussotti)00:55
• Total Runtime38:48

Info for Bussotti: Complete Music for Guitar

Sylvano Bussotti (1931-2021) counts among the most original and underappreciated composers working in the second half of the last century. He became famous – notorious – in the 1960s for ‘graphic’ scores which required considerable realisation on the part of the performer. His early work, however, is invested with a rhythmic regularity, a clarity of phrase structure and a lyricism reminiscent of Luigi Dallapiccola.

Pierre Boulez saw Bussotti as an anachronism when they met and (in the composer’s recollection ‘completely rejected everything that I had written so far, compositions in his view largely influenced by that lyrical mediterranean dodecaphonic style which he particularly detested.’ In retrospect Bussotti’s music takes its place alongside that of his elder Italian contemporary Bruno Maderna as a oblique and distinctively Italian, discursive and colourful view over the variegated and sometimes alienated landscape of postwar serialism.

Beyond The Rara Requiem, recorded by Sinopoli for DG, most of Bussotti’s large-scale projects such as a ‘Passion according to Sade’ have so far failed to find a place in the record catalogues, where he is mostly represented by various pieces with or for the flute. However, Bussotti also wrote prominently for the guitar throughout his career. This new album from Alberto Mesirca is the most complete survey yet recorded, beginning with Ermafrodito (1999), a ‘mythological fantasy’ for guitar which evokes a magical ballet with a body that gradually emerges in the background and takes over the scene.

Bussotti’s other substantial work for guitar is Ultima rara (Pop Song), which from the beginning undermines the promised concept of ‘last things’ with a teasing textual commentary (spoken here by Luca Scarlini) and a playful use of the kind of refrain which extends pop songs beyond the organic life of their material. Shorter pieces include the light-heated and tuneful Popolaresca, as well as a reflective take on neoclassicism, Nuvola Barocca. The album closes with a brief tribute to Bussotti on his 60th birthday from Toru Takemitsu.

Sylvano Bussotti ((1931-2021) was an Italian composer of contemporary classical music, but also a painter, set and costume designer, opera director, writer and academic teacher.

As a composer he was influenced by the twelve-tone music of Webern and later John Cage. Examples of his use of graphic notation in his pieces, often reflecting his personal life, included La Passion selon Sade and Lorenzaccio. He was a composer of the Florentine artistic school, that has been active since the end of World War II. He experimented with the interaction between sound and vision, a synaesthesis of art derived from historical avant-gardes, from Kandinsky to futurism, to Scriabin and Schoenberg, all the way to Bauhaus.

Guitarist Alberto Mesirca has been closely associated with Bussotti during his life and this new recording is a tribute to a great master and thinker. Bussotti’s surviving partner Rocco Quaglia wrote affectionately: “I attended the concert by Alberto Mesirca and Luca Scarlini, performers of a truly high level both interpretive and emotional, their technical and vocal prowess is capable of shaking and provoking, in the listener, intense feelings of pleasure and wonder. It makes me very happy to hear about the possibility of recording a CD giving a larger audience the same emotion I felt. Well done guys!”

Alberto Mesirca, classical guitar
Luca Scarlini, vocals

Alberto Mesirca
The American Record Guide praised his Scarlatti as “The best Scarlatti I’ve heard on solo guitar”, and Classical Guitar Magazine wrote: “Superb recording from the prodigiously talented Mesirca”.

The 29 year-old guitarist Alberto Mesirca was born in Italy in 1984. He completed his Bachelor and Master of Arts at the Conservatory of Castelfranco Veneto, in the class of the eminent teacher Gianfranco Volpato, ending them with highest score, “Summa cum laude” and special honor mention. Further studies were made at the Music Academy of Kassel, in Germany, with Wolfgang Lendle. His Konzert-Examen was praised with highest Honors. He won for two times the “Golden Guitar”, for best recording in 2007 and as Best Upcoming Artist of the Year in 2009.

With the collaboration of Hopkinson Smith and Franco Pavan he published the previously unknown and unpublished compositions by Francesco Da Milano which appeared in the Castelfranco Veneto 1565 Lute Manuscript, distributed now by Orphee Editions. The re-discovery led Dusan Bogdanovic to write a composition for Alberto on a theme of Da Milano called “Tre Ricercari sulla Compagna”.

He was nominated in 2009 assistant of the Guitar Class at the Conservatory of Castelfranco Veneto. In hundreds of concerts he had the chance to work with excellent musicians such as Dimitri Ashkenazy, Vladimir Mendelssohn, Martin Rummel, Daniel Rowland, Domenico Nordio, Marco De Santi, Andras Adorjan, Peter and Jonas Giger, Mirko Satto, the Enesco, Ardeo and Acies string quartets, Quartetto d’Archi di Venezia, ChamberJam Europe and Ex Novo Ensemble.

The past two years have been characterized by an intensive period of performances, lectures and masterclasses which brought him at the Auckland University (New Zealand), at the Guitar Foundation of America Convention (Georgia, USA), at the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival (Finland), playing the national premiere of a composition of György Kurtàg, after the recent collaboration with the composer, and for the Stradivari Foundation, at the Silesian Guitar Autumn in Tychy (Poland) and the Festival Classique in The Hague, at the Beethoven Festival in Melbourne (Australia) among many others, as well as performances at the Concertgebouw in

Amsterdam, Teatro La Fenice in Venice, Teatro Regio in Parma, Auditori Nacional in Valencia, Kunsthalle Wien, and for the Italian Insitutes of Culture of Paris, Oslo, Helsinki, Stockholm, and Barcelona.

In collaboration with Marc Ribot he recorded the complete guitar works of the Haitian composer Frantz Casséus; for this recording he is candidate for “Best Solo Performance” at the 2012 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. In december 2011 Alberto was responsible of the digitalization and creation of the Musical Archive of the Beyazit Library in Istanbul, Turkey.

Alberto Mesirca has premiered a composition at the 2013 Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival composed for him by Leo Brouwer.

In 2013 his recording British Guitar Music, published by Paladino Music OG, has won the Golden Guitar for “Best Recording of the Year”.

Booklet for Bussotti: Complete Music for Guitar