Quartetto Prometeo

Reinventions was the last project of the Italian double bassist and composer Stefano Scodanibbio (1956-2012), the "dream project" he did not live to hear released. It gathers his string quartet arrangements of three Contrapuncti from Johann Sebastian Bach's The Art of Fugue, four Spanish guitar pieces and five Mexican songs, set out as one long sequence. The arrangements keep the outlines of the originals but move much of the writing into harmonics at very slow tempi. Irvine Arditti writes in the liner notes that they are "unmistakably the work of his hand".

The Quartetto Prometeo is Giulio Rovighi and Aldo Campagnari (violins), Massimo Piva (viola) and Francesco Dillon (cello). They recorded the programme in January 2011 at the Teatro Giuseppe Verdi in Pollenza, with Gianluca Gentili as engineer. Scodanibbio died about a year later of motor neurone disease. Arditti, a friend of the composer, brought the project to ECM, where Manfred Eicher was executive producer. It was the quartet's first ECM album, and the booklet adds an essay by Paul Griffiths on the Spanish sources. Scodanibbio had worked with Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, John Cage and Terry Riley, and ran the Rassegna di Nuova Musica in his native Macerata for over thirty years.

The three Bach pieces, arranged between 2007 and 2009, frame two sets. The Quattro Pezzi Spagnoli come from guitar works by Francisco Tárrega, Miguel Llobet, Dionisio Aguado and Fernando Sor. The Canzoniere Messicano closes with Bésame mucho and the traditional La llorona. In the Contrapuncti some melody notes are displaced an octave upwards as harmonics, so Bach's lines sound thin, high and glassy. The Mexican songs share the same slow harmonic shifts but have a warmer, more lyrical surface. Bésame mucho, nearly seven minutes long, is taken apart and rebuilt phrase by phrase.

In The Independent, Andy Gill heard the pieces refracted "as if underwater" and praised the "quicksilver grace" of the quartet. Richard Williams kept returning to Bésame mucho (The Blue Moment, April 2013): "There's something magical about the way Scodanibbio seems to refract the theme." He also recalled the composer's attachment to Mexico, where he chose to die, in Cuernavaca. Musical Pointers recommended the disc unreservedly as late-night listening and a memorial to its author.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 2072, released in March 2013, with liner notes by Irvine Arditti and Paul Griffiths.