Battistelli: L'Anarca

Sandro Lombardi (reciter) Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI/Pierre-Andre Valade, Ensemble Recherche/Roland Kluttig Straivarius STR 57013 ****

Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli, who is writing an opera on Al Gore's eco-documentary An Inconvenient Truthfor La Scala, based his 2005 orchestral piece Afterthought(about a Shakesperean tragedy) on material from another opera, Richard III.

Some of the rhythmic gestures in this troubled and troubling piece also seem to owe a debt to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The heavily theatrical Begleitmusik zu einer Dichtspielszene (Incidental music to a poetic scene)of 1994 makes dazzling use of an ensemble of 12 instruments, and a rumblingly strange orchestral 1989 work Anarca ( Hommage à Ernst Jünger), places the German writer's views on the anarch of the title in the voice of a reciter. www.stradivarius.it