Sounds of near-silence

Salvatore Sciarrino's haunting music is showcased at the Sligo New Music Festival. Michael Dervan hears why from festival director Ian Wilson

The first time I visited Ian Wilson in his remote Co Leitrim bungalow, I felt almost like I was travelling to the end of the earth. The sky was low and grey. The day was wet. The atmosphere was bleak, the surroundings almost forbidding. The second time, the sun was out with exceptional March clarity, and the air breathed a welcoming, genuinely spring-like promise.

Wilson's relocation to Leitrim, and his time as the county's composer-in-residence, has clearly been paying artistic dividends for the local community. He's become programme adviser for the active, Sligo-based Con Brio music society, for whom he also gives a series of music talks. And it was Con Brio's Luisa McConville who proposed his name when the Model Arts and Niland Gallery was looking for someone to direct the upcoming Sligo New Music Festival.

Nominating a composer was not actually the most unusual of moves. The festival has been directed by a number of composers, each planning their programmes around their own work. This self-centred idea was never proposed to Wilson, and he didn't raise it himself.

"I knew within a day or two," he says, "that I wanted to feature Salvatore Sciarrino's music. I made a very definite suggestion that we should be expanding the view of things outwards."

Sciarrino, a major figure now in his mid-50s, is little known in Ireland. Wilson came to the Italian composer's work through opera, when he had started work on his own first opera, Hamelin.

"I'm not a huge opera fan, as such, and one of the things that always bothered me about singers was the over-use of vibrato," says Wilson. "A friend of mine said, 'You should listen to Sciarrino and see how he deals with it,'and I was impressed with his solutions. I thought the music was very distinctive and unique, and I listened to more after the opera. I got hold of other CDs, including Vanitas and some of his piano music."

Vanitas, a "still life in one act" for mezzo-soprano, cello and piano, opened the 1981 season at the Piccola Scala in Milan, "and I went to Huddersfield to hear his music theatre piece, Lohengrin", says Wilson.

In Wilson's vision, the RTÉ Living Music Festival, which featured Luciano Berio last year, can deal with "the big stuff", and Sligo can deal with smaller works in a similar way, with multiple concerts and talks.

"You can get a good flavour within one day of what a composer's music is about," Wilson says.

The Sciarrino opera that Wilson sought out was Luci Mie Traditrici (My Treacherous Eyes), based on a 17th-century play that took its plot from the life of the composer and murderer, Carlo Gesualdo. Luci Mie Traditrici, wrote Bernard Holland in the New York Times, about choreographer Trisha Brown's production, "is apprehended by the ear just as it retreats into silence. The peeps and hushed implosions of its orchestra and the short, brittle fragments assigned to the four singers onstage are specks set against a blank plane cleared of all other intrusion. The sounds - and often the loudest of them is the rustle of a conductor turning pages - are like a violation of the emptiness toward which Mr Sciarrino's opera is seemingly drawn."

Sciarrino's music is often carried on wisps of sound, with what seem like remote whistles arriving on a soft rush of wind, drawing the listener into an environment of calm where even a gesture of moderate loudness can surprise and shock. He's also written works of obsessive violence, but the more characteristic mode, which seems to derive from the fringes of the tone of the flute, is the quiet one.

Wilson has called his Sciarrino survey 'Uno Spirito Sottile', borrowing from the title of the work he's chosen to end the festival, La perfezione di uno spirito sottile (The Perfection of a Subtle Spirit). The piece is a 40-minute threnody for flute and voice.

"In the case of La perfezione," says Wilson, "he was trying to recreate a sense of desolation that the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl effected in not just in the local vicinity, but in a lot of sensitive souls around the world. I think he is very aware of human mortality and wants to convey that fragility in a lot of his music, which is why you have often what might seem at first quite fragile sounds. But they're actually very strong, if delicate, like a spider's web.

"He creates these gentle backgrounds for things to happen against, yet they're more than just backgrounds, they're an inherent part of what goes on. And some of the piano pieces are very violent, almost in opposition to what he's doing in those gentler works."

The repertoire heard in Sligo will range from two studies for cello from 1974 up to Immagine fenicia for solo flute, written three years ago. Wilson is bringing over the Sciarrino specialists of the Italian ensemble, Alter Ego, whose three programmes include works by just two other composers, Jonathan Harvey and Messiaen.

Wilson has obviously enjoyed being director of this year's Sligo festival, so much so that he has an immediate answer about where his interest would lie if he were asked to direct another one.

"Right now it would go towards Rebecca Saunders," he says.

His vision is that the festival should appeal to audiences throughout Ireland, by offering "something unusual, something they might not have come across before". And he cherishes the idea of alternating "composers of very established, high reputations with younger composers of, let's say, similar talent, but much earlier on in their careers".

"Having listened to Rebecca Saunders over a couple of years, I'm convinced that she's a very strong voice, one again that's hardly heard here," he says. "OK, she's in her early 30s, but she's a fantastic grasp of drama and theatre in her work, not to mention the grasp of timbre and colour that a lot of composers of her age seem to have now."

Wilson's programming taste features in Dublin next month, in the National Concert Hall's Composers' Choice series. For his concert in the series on Thursday, April 17th, he's invited the British group, Psappha, to play two of his own pieces, Eat, Sleep, Empire