FRANCESCO COLASANTO

"Each of the four movements takes on a descriptive, but not oleographic, character. No solo instruments, but, in turn, both the string section and the clarinets and oboes seem to sing the “deeds” of the Italian navigator accompanied by the incessant bassoon, reduced almost to “words and background noise” produced by his crew, and by the sudden laments of the horns that almost seem like the unanswered questions of the natives of the New World."  

Angri Info

Colasanto's compositional style is deliberately distant from the twentieth-century avant-garde and, in my opinion, even from the German Neo-Romanticism of Wolfgang Rihm, while incorporating some formal and harmonic characteristics of the neo-tonal language of New Symplicity composers, such as those of the Englishman John Tavener and the Pole Mikołaj Górecki. Compared to these composers, Colasanto replaces the religious and folkloric references of their countries of origin with programmatic allusions highlighted by the titles and linked to the cultural milieu of the global South; all within a writing centered on simple and sometimes reiterated motifs, often superimposed and organized according to a classical harmonic logic with some nods to early twentieth-century French modernism.  

Egidio Pozzi - University of Calabria