Anaclase — Pozzanghere | mezzo seccate
la découverte de pozzanghere | mezzo seccate d’Oscar Bianchi dynamise résolument la soirée. Outre le recours à un soprano d’une roborative expressivité, la nouvelle œuvre du compositeur italo-suisse, qui emprunte son titre à Montale (Ossi di seppia, 1925), convoque un instrumentarium qu’on pourrait dire traditionnel n’étaient l’usage qu’on en fait et la présence de l’accordéon. La subtilité des relais entre les R voluptueusement et fort durablement roulés, pour ne point dire rugis, par l’extraordinaire Katrina Paula Felsberga, et leur prolongement dans les timbres instrumentaux, parfois par imitation, d’autres fois selon un spasme commun, fascinent d’emblée. La pièce « flirte parfois avec un univers sonore homogène articulé par le quatuor avec contrebasse et l’accordéon qui, en fusionnant, amplifient et dramatisent cet espace du mystère que savent si bien convoquer les instruments à cordes », explique Bianchi (même source) ; « par opposition, le piano et la percussion incarnent du concret, le terrestre, le primordial ». Les échanges entre soprano et trompette se font de plus en plus prégnant au fil de l’exécution, scellant une inquiétante étrangeté que souligne l’admirable économie de l’écriture, mue par une inventivité sans cesse frémissante interrogeant jusqu’à la fonction de la voix, « au-delà du sémantique ou du lyrique ».
Anaclase, “cinq créations fêtent cinquante bougies”
https://www.anaclase.com/chroniques/cinq-cr%C3%A9ations-f%C3%AAtent-cinquante-bougies
Reviewed Work
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)