1999 release ** Both peculiar archaism and highest sensitivity characterize this quiet, while extremely tense sound landscapes of the Sicilian composer Salvatore Sciarrino.

Salvatore Sciarrino’s music-theatre piece Luci mie traditrici (Oh my deceitful eyes) was originally based upon the colourful life of the composer Carlo Gesualdo, but when he discovered that Schnittke was also busy on an opera on the same subject, Sciarrino changed track and eliminated all references to the great madrigalist in his final score. Yet the fascination with Gesualdo’s music remained, and the spin-off was a series of instrumental transcriptions that he grouped together in 1998 as Le voci sottovetro (The voices behind the glass) – quicksilver miniatures full of unexpected instrumental colours and dizzying changes of perspective, which recall Peter Maxwell Davies’s Sixties’ reworkings of medieval and Renaissance sources more than anything else.