Pozzanghere I Mezzo Seccate

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First performance: 17 November 2023, IRCAM, Centre Pompidou, Paris - Ensemble l’Itinéraire, KatrÏna Paula Felsberga, soprano, Miguel Perez Inesta, conductor, Johannes Regnier, electronics

First German performance: 17 July 2024, Festival Summer in Stuttgart - Ensemble Modern

Duration: 25 minutes

Pozzanghere | mezzo seccate (Puddles | half dried up) is the third part of an ongoing exploration of the voice as a privileged medium — not merely an instrument of expression, but a site of transformation.

In Matra, an hour-long cantata drawing on texts by Mary Magdalene, Lucretius, and the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, the voice bears the weight of existence and longing, becoming a space where sound turns into self-experience. In Thanks to My Eyes, the operatic form confronts pain through narrative: music becomes the terrain where myth and dramaturgy reclaim time, and where the voice renders intelligible what resists language.

In Pozzanghere | mezzo seccate, the voice enters a new paradigm. It no longer narrates, seduces, or symbolizes. It inhabits a liminal space — between impulse and construction, breath and structure. Neither character nor commentary, it functions as a condition. It does not represent: it reveals. A threshold through which the listener is invited not to observe, but to participate.

The title and libretto are freely inspired by I limoni, the opening poem of Ossi di seppia by Eugenio Montale. “Puddles half dried up” evokes transience and fragility: time evaporating under heat. Montale’s poetics — stripped of rhetorical excess, attentive to precision without renouncing emotional intensity — resonate deeply with my own musical ideals.

This duality permeates the ensemble. The string quartet, double bass, and accordion form a fluid, porous sonic body, capable of dissolving identities through fusion. Piano and percussion, by contrast, embody the concrete and the corporeal; yet through extended techniques — bows on metal, horsehair gliding across piano strings — they transcend their percussive origin, opening zones of resonance and suspension.

Suspended between these poles are the soprano and the trumpet. The soprano’s role is deliberately amphibious: at once body and breath, sound and speech, moving between lyric construction and raw impulse. The trumpet, her reflection or nemesis, shadows and distorts her presence — doubling, contradicting or destabilizing the voice’s claim to singularity.

Unfolding as a continuum rather than a sequence of episodes, Pozzanghere | mezzo seccate reflects and evaporates like the puddle it evokes. Here, the voice is neither bearer of meaning nor vehicle of excess, but a creolized space where instinct and technique, memory and potential, body and culture converge — not to resolve their differences, but to inhabit them fully.

Oscar Bianchi (with Jérémie Szpirglas)