Mario Caroli has already recorded all of Salvatore Sciarrino’s works for solo flute and a disc of chamber music featuring the instrument. Though this latest collection includes the three-movement concerto that Sciarrino composed for Caroli in 2009, Libronotturno delle Voci, in which the solo flute engages in dialogues with a succession of instruments from the orchestra, the main work here is the wonderful Cantare con Silenzio from 1999, in which Caroli’s ethereal solo lines underpin the six voices of the Neue Vocalsolisten in settings of poems by Michel Serres and Edgard Gunzig and Isabelle Stengers: percussion and live electronics add further layers of embroidery to create a fragile, elusive work in which shards of text and music seem to orbit each other in ever-changing configurations. Between them comes the first recording of Sciarrino’s earliest orchestral piece, the 11-minute Berceuse, completed in 1969 when he was 22. The textures are denser than they would later become, but beneath the tangled surfaces there are already hints of his unmistakable sound world.
