When it comes to writing for guitar, most composers maintain an "all for nothing" strategy; either you write one piece for the instrument -- usually as part of a published anthology or for a particular performer -- or you write, as did Joaquín Rodrigo and
Leo Brouwer, most of your output for it. There are a rare few who write a considerable amount of guitar music in addition to lots of other things; for example, Brazilian composer
Heitor Villa-Lobos. However,
Villa-Lobos was a guitar player, and judging from private recordings he made in the mid-'30s, he was a good one. Italian composer Goffredo Petrassi was not a player, but in the late '50s he became captivated by the sound of the guitar after answering the call to one of those anthologies mentioned above. In the end, Petrassi wrote about 40 minutes worth of music including the guitar. Suoni Notturni (1959) and Nunc (1971) are both solo pieces, Alais (1977) is a duet for harpsichord and guitar, and Seconda Serenata-Trio (1962) is an ensemble piece for harp, guitar, and mandolin. To fill out the program, guitarist
Angelo Colone has fashioned a set of transcriptions from Petrassi's folk song arrangements co-written with folklorist Giorgio Nataletti: Canti delli Campagna Romana (1927), originally for voice and piano but sung here by soprano Laura Pugliese and played by what sounds like a modular ensemble of two or three guitars, mandolin, and harp.
It's hard to say exactly what the combination might be at any given point, as Tactus is not exactly clear on that in the booklet. Of the pieces here, the strongest is Alais (1977), which is based on ostinati and has an onward, rushing polyphony, not to mention a sense of excitement, though the snap pizz on the low strings of the guitar is a little overused. The solo pieces are very sparse and developed from row structures; moreover, they are not very interesting. Seconda Serenata-Trio is, however, quite novel, sounding a bit like atonal Italian café-concert music; one figure in the mandolin part is almost certainly a direct quote from the first piece in Anton Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 10. It is hard to tell what is up with the song settings; Laura Pugliese's shockingly ugly singing is so wide in tone, glassy in sonority, and off the scales in pitch that her performance wouldn't win her a role in the chorus of a third-rate Russian opera company. One cannot imagine how, after assembling the rest of the program with such care,
Colone would settle for a singer with such an unattractive-sounding voice, yet his decision to do so undermines the whole project. Only the Seconda Serenata-Trio and Alias are of interest, and only in the context of very remote byways of twelve-tone technique; the rest, sadly, fails.