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イタリアのコントラバス・ソリストとの秀逸共演作!!ノルウェー出身のダブルベーシストにして作曲家、クセナキスやベリオをはじめとする現代音楽家の楽曲、また自国の伝統音楽の演奏もしたりする強者ダブルベース・プレイヤーHakon Thelin。2012年に惜しくも他界したイタリアのコントラバス・ソリスト兼作曲家Stefano Scodanibbioとのダブルベース共演を収録したアルバム。2009年にノルウェーで実践したツアーのライブ録音を纏めたものであり、 Luciano Berioのチェロ独奏曲[Sequenza XIVb]及び、それぞれの自作曲を演奏した全6テイクが聴け、息遣いの様に柔らかくも重厚なパターンが絶えず変化し継続する激推しの一作。







Most of the music on this album is live recordings from a tour I did with Stefano Scodanibbio through Norway in 2009. Stefano suggested that I should play the first bass of Da una certa nebbia, and he would play the second bass. I had been at the first performance of this piece in Stockholm in 2002, where Stefano played in duo with Barry Guy. The first bass (which was then played by Stefano), is a typical reflection of his own style, and he chose the material from his very personal “waste paper basket”. The second bass however, written for Barry Guy, forces the performer into a meditative, listening situation, playing almost only a few scattered pizzicati throughout the piece. This conceptual approach was so surprising that it almost overshadows my sounding memory of the piece. But when we later performed Da una certa nebbia in Norway I rediscovered this beautiful and contemplative music, which slowly unfolds in changing patterns of shimmering breaths.

In his own CD sleeve notes for Geografia amorosa (col legno, 2000), Scodanibbio expresses: “What is the language of the contrabass? How can an idea be given voice? How can one determine from among the great variety of the contrabass’s voices, from among its thousand voices, the voice? Does language [the use of language] perhaps conceal the voice? And if in the end ‘the flight of the voice into the use of language is to have an end’, if ‘the completed thought have no more thoughts’, then are we not perhaps looking down into the abyss of silence?”.

In Scodanibbio's 're-invention' of Luciano Berio's Sequenza XIV for cello (written for Rohan de Saram) he was explicitly asked by Berio to make a version for double bass using the new techniques Berio had heard in his pieces. The piece originally combines western and non-western elements, in homage to Rohan de Saram’s Sri Lankan descent and diverse musical background, but the bass Sequenza also contains a high degree of original material. As in all of Scodanibbio’s compositions, the interchanging of harmonics and ordinary tones shapes the identity of the ‘new’ Sequenza. The extremely diversified melodic passages, regarding pitch, rhythm, dynamics and timbre, reach into an even further dimension when they travel in and out of harmonics and ordinary tones. Overtones are used extensively as ‘resonators’, in creating chords from the sounding overtones. And, inspired by guitar techniques in flamenco music, Scodanibbio supplemented his version with several brief, personal commentaries on Berio’s music,

The two improvisations that are included on this CD where performed spontaneously in the concerts, without any previous talks or planning. They were named retrospectively, after remembering some of Scodanibbio's favourite likes: cigarillos and whiskey.