Trascrizione o trasfigurazione? Elaborazioni di Salvatore Sciarrino da Carlo Gesualdo

The familiarity of Salvatore Sciarrino towards the genre of arrangement dates by now more than 25 years. For him the arrangement is a process of transfiguration of a piece beloved, a way to take possession of it. In this kind of arrangement the creativity of the arranger must not be absent at all, and therefore Sciarrino prefers to call it “elaborazione”.

In the corpus of Sciarrino’s arrangements from different authors, both ancient and modern, Gesualdo has a particularly important place, with several elaborations for different instrumental groups, with or without voice. The Gesualdo’s pieces that have mostly stimulated the imagination of Sciarrino are the madrigal Tu m’uccidi, o crudele (V book) and the instrumental Gagliarda del Principe di Venosa, with respectively five and three elaborations, from 1998 to 1999.

The examination of these elaborations and their comparison among them and with the original, allows to show the progressive detachment from the primary source. In a way only in appearance paradoxical, the more the original piece is profoundly assimilated, the more the elaboration goes away, taking up a high degree of autonomy. The original is always recognizable, but more secretly, and the characteristics of the sonorous world of Sciarrino little by little replace those of the language of Gesualdo.