Susanna Mälkki / Ensemble Intercontemporain LUCA FRANCESCONI Etymo - Da Capo - A fuoco - Animus

Luca Francesconi, born in 1956, has emerged as one of the leading Italian composers of the generation after Berio and Nono. A pupil of Berio and Stockhausen, Francesconi is less well known in the UK than, for instance, Salvatore Sciarrino, who is nine years older, but as this collection of ensemble pieces shows, he has a genuinely distinctive musical personality, and the knack of creating sonorities of real immediacy and dramatic power. With the exception of Da Capo, for nine instruments, from 1986, the pieces here date from the mid-1990s. The biggest, most ambitious and most memorable of those is Etymo, which takes a collection of fragments from Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, sets and atomises them for a soprano soloist and enmeshes the voice in teeming, febrile textures spun from an instrumental ensemble with real-time digital processing. Animus is an electronics-based piece too, with a solo trombone caught in a sound web of its reflections, while A Fuoco pits a solo guitar against an ensemble in a study of musical memory. The sounds are haunting, seductive, intensely vivid; it's a shame that the accompanying notes don't match the clarity of the music. (The Guardian)