Photo: Silvia Accorrà
The world premiere of Giorgio Colombo Taccani’s work, La cenere e il giardino – omaggio a Danilo Kiš for 16 strings (2018), written for and premiered by Kammerorchester Basel conducted by Jessica Horsley, is now available on SoundCloud here.
Giorgio writes:
My new work stems from the emotional environment of the poetic and imaginative world of Danilo Kiš, a Serbian writer to be listed among the most important literary figures of the last century. The work refers in particular to one of his most famous novels, Garden, ashes, written between 1962 and 1964. The book recounts the dramatic autobiographical events that see his father disappear into the abyss of the Nazi concentration camps, transforming the story in a visionary and mythic sense, certainly not annulling the anguish, but projecting it into an unreal world, in which fiction, mask and illusion combine to draw imaginary worlds and perspectives.
La cenere e il giardino follows the emotional path of the novel, not so much by creating any formal parallels in the detail, something almost impossible as well as pointless, but keeping in mind the overall form and the constant use of humoral, not straightforward associative techniques. In the course of its approximately twelve minutes, in a discontinuous way the work displays a progressive loss of figural energy, a sort of evaporation of the certainties reached at the start, still capable of assertive moments: the writing still in progress of a mythic guide to bus, ship, rail and air travel, a work his father had been working on for ever, becomes stuck; the pages, like the family furniture assailed by time, start to crumble, the locomotives are blocked in decaying stations.
Further info on colombotaccani.it available here.