Opus Mind by Riccardo Bricchi and Antonio Tarallo

Anathema is a work for oboe solo written in the months across 2022 and 2023 for Italian oboist Riccardo Bricchi. Anathema dives into the supernatural component of music. The work is structured around three main themes: 1. Virtuosic Challenges: complex rhythms, rapid passages, and challenging fingerings 2. Timbral Exploration: experimenting with different tonal colours, textures, and dynamic contrasts. 3. Narrative and Conceptual Elements: the work incorporates narrative or conceptual elements, narrative music, that rarely repeats itself and that explores abstract concepts. The title follows the previous solo work written by the composer, a work for solo violin titled Doktor Faustus.

The 'Lunenburg Sonata' originates from a request by Paolo Grazia, an extraordinary musician, and a friend of the composer. Lunenburg is a beautiful Canadian town, home to a prestigious music academy where the premiere was scheduled. The term 'Sonata' loosely refers to the tripartite form, as the composition was planned in three movements. Currently, only two have been completed. In the first movement, the composer opted for a process of 'mimesis' between the two instruments, overlapping to generate homogeneous figures slightly refracted by more or less evident heterophony. All of this leads to a progressive accumulation of material, manifesting in the central part as a rather exclaimed rhythmic-dynamic continuum, which in turn fragments into shards of pulsation reminiscent of the piece's beginning. In the second movement, the descending linear profiles, rarely curvilinear segments of the oboe, evoke visual suggestions: Mondrian, especially. The 'primary colours,' instead, are suggested by the figural counterpoint of the piano, sometimes distilling harmonic pearls as condensation of notes from the oboe's profile, sometimes announcing, with fleeting 'bell-like' arpeggios, the harmonic regions to which those profiles belong. All within an atmosphere of extreme abstraction and, at the same time, emotional intensity.

"A 6 Letter Letter" is one of Elliot Carter's final works. Written in March 1996 in New York, it was intended as an encore piece and was first performed on April 27, 1996, in Basel, Switzerland, to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of the dedicatee, Dr. Paul Sacher, and the tenth anniversary of the foundation named after him. Rich in imagination and inexhaustible melodic invention, Carter transforms every primary musical element into an artistic fact, exclusively using the sounds of the notation derived from the dedicatee's surname: eS – A – C – H – E – D.

A regularly repeated sound with menacing regularity opens the path of the first section of 'Presagio' ('Omen'). It's gradually intersected by different elements, always within an uneasy and unstable atmosphere. A lone attempt at singing, quickly forgotten and erased by the immediate reappearance of previous figures. The journey enchants itself upon the paroxysmal repetition of an octave leap, followed by a vast silence. Has something occurred, or has the threat drawn thus far disappeared? The intentionally ambiguous response lies in the concluding section, radically different: a finally calm melodic fragment emerges on the stage. Four repetitions gradually strip it of sounds in a dynamic that folds evermore towards delicate dynamics. Is it an earned serenity or new presaging disquiet?

Sometimes, when beginning a new piece, one might imagine it from something other than sound. Everything can stem from a visual memory, an image, a geometric pattern, a figure, or even a physical gesture. Mysteriously, many things not immediately related to sound can inspire a path that only later translates into a musical construction. In this case, 'Partire dal cielo (Starting from the Sky)' takes inspiration from repetitive gestures and ritual evocations practised by the painter and sculptor Antonio Ligabue during his tormented and extraordinary creative actions. This great artist would begin all his paintings starting from the sky, from the top of the canvas. This composition is inspired by and dedicated to Antonio Ligabue.