Giovanni Verrando
Orchestral Works

In certain music from recent decades, examples abound of electronics applied to solo instruments, duets, or small ensembles; much rarer are the cases of electronic resources integrated into an entire symphonic orchestra: this CD by Giovanni Verrando, which gathers four recent orchestral works using electronics, is therefore of particular interest.

The common trait to these pieces is the abolition of magnificence and orchestral rhetoric in favor of a dry, non-discursive language, which furthermore juxtaposes digital sounds to traditional instruments, transforming the orchestra into an acoustic-electronic hybrid, with varying degrees of interrelation.

"Sottile", for example, a piece from 1996-97, employs a chamber orchestra, thus a reduced ensemble, with electronic sounds «intervening as discreetly as possible». These become more insistent in the second part of the piece, multiplying unusual sounds produced by the strings. The same happens in "Agile" from 2004; it also lasts 12 minutes, is also divided into two parts, and the second part, coincidentally, is subtitled 'heterophonic': impure sounds, let’s call them glitches, are welcomed into the orchestral fabric.

This is an important step, with the orchestra one does not joke: it is the testing ground for anyone who wants to become a composer, when grown up, and those who want to face it must say something new. For Giovanni Verrando (born in Sanremo in 1965), electronic hybridization is the necessary step for «the identification of a style».

In "Triptych" for a large orchestra from 2005-06, the leap is complete: the orchestral sound is tarnished by effects, noises, disturbances, as if the orchestra were no longer seated in an auditorium but in a factory or a laboratory; in the second episode of the piece, a metallic-sounding electric bass also intervenes (while the first and third parts are more reflective) and it almost seems to find sounds we are more accustomed to compared to the contamination between traditional and electroacoustic sounds that pervades this piece (15 minutes in duration). The white noise filtering in the first episode, as Verrando writes on his site, are «freely derived from two sounds by Pan Sonic, as an explicit homage to their noise literature».

Is that enough? If you want more, there's "Polyptych", the last piece on the CD, for three electrified orchestral groups (from 2007, duration 11 minutes). The most abstract piece on the CD, with a massive presence of noise, as if electronics were conditioning the orchestral sound and not vice versa. A plausible hypothesis if, as the author writes (truthfully, regarding the previous piece, "Triptych"), certain electronic notes are later transcribed for acoustic instruments, so in some cases, the electronic production of sound drives the author to «develop a specific and adequate orchestration».

Therefore, listening to this CD is a remarkable experience, which makes me welcome Giovanni Verrando with a resounding Welcome!: yes, among the composers to love.