Quick Analysis No.6
Salvatore Sciarrino - Piano Sonata No.1
I’ve always had a fondness for pieces which finish in the same way that they begin: To me the mirroring of the start and end of a piece often implies a cyclical nature which might imbue a work with a sense of endlessness; a sense that it could all happen again and again, like we might just be witnessing a lap of a circuit and there is no true start or end. I also have a particular affinity for pieces which not only end as they begin, but in which all the music in between these points feels like an extension, expansion or a reconfiguration of the same material and principals. This is what many would tend to refer to in music as an arch form; a monistic structure consisting of a single section which presents a single musical idea, develops or expands upon it in some way, and then returns to its original form, thus resembling in structural terms the arc of an arch. Sciarrino’s first sonata for piano (1976) is, to me, a perfect example of this arch form in practice, and is also a remarkable example of an almost purely gestural and textural approach to piano writing.
The first sonata opens with a series of three rapid, highly chromatic flurries of hemi-demi-semi quavers, played in the piano’s lower register and separated by pensive silences. These three gestures establish the piece’s most common and recursive material: rapid flurries of notes, moving up and down most commonly in scalic stepwise motion but sometimes leaping larger intervals, generally grouped in gestures of twenty notes and almost always using all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. The speed of these flurries combined with their chromatic saturation and their initial soft dynamic level renders their discrete pitch characteristics largely incomprehensible and instead creates a perception of them as a singular sound: a low textural rumble, a rapid swell of muddied notes.
After three of these flurries in the low register we then, by contrast, hear a rapid descending cascade from the piano’s high register back down to its low register. Also highly chromatic in its pitch conception, these cascades feature both hands playing rhythmically desynchronised arpeggios that, like the flurries, happen so rapidly that their discrete elements are obscured by their overall gesture and texture. In this case it’s the rapidity of the harmony (which does often outline diatonic harmonic relationships, but each hand’s clashes with the other providing a sense of dens polytonality which ends up feeling wholly chromatic) in combination with the hands’ desynchronisation which forces the perception of a chaotic downward tumbling.
This first page contains the foundations for almost everything that will subsequently be heard in the first sonata. Sciarrino gives us an exposition of his building blocks in separation which, over the next fifteen-or-so minutes, will merge, extend, expand and move all over the piano’s register, building to a frenzy at times, and above all constantly moving through seemingly endless incarnations of rapid, shimmering, virtuosic gestures. The speed of the playing is key; for the effect of the music to be at its best the listener must have no time to unravel what they have just heard, but instead they must be swept up and beguiled by the bewildering pace of the music.
Not long after the piece’s opening does it begin to expand its introductory gestures. From pages 6-8 we find a greatly extended sequence of flurry gestures that begin in the extreme low register of the piano and move all the way up to the extreme high register, before crescendoing to a startling fortissimo. This is followed by an expanded version of the rapidly cycling chromatic-cell gesture, which begins similarly to how it has done previously with a four-note chromatic-cell repeating a figure of D-flat, C-natural, D-natural, B-natural, but then switching to a similar four-note cell which rises by step each incarnation, reaching a very high C-sharp.
The cascade gestures are also expanded upon after the first sonata’s introduction: if we look at these three examples of the cascading gesture taken from pages 14, 15 and 16 we can see the gesture getting more and more expansive in its length and register.
The piece continues presenting and altering these gestures in rapid succession, seemingly getting more and more erratic and frenzied. The only material that can really be thought of as entirely distinct from these core building blocks are a few very brief and far-between gestures of frenzied alternating two-note accented chords, which act to break up the texture of endless, rapid, scalic and arpeggiated note patterns, such as this on page 14.
The first sonata reaches a kind-of virtuosic climax on page 40-41: a long run of ascending and descending four-note chromatic cells morphs into a wide cascading arpeggio in contrary motion between the hands, followed by a triple fortissimo flurry in the high register, that is then followed by a low rumble of alternating chords, and finally another series of flurries which crescendo to fortissimo, climaxing with a triple fortissimo glissandi up the piano’s entire register. This section combines all of the piece’s gestural types, in quick succession, imbued with an almost Lisztian pianistic virtuosity. There really is something of the late-romantic about this section, but entirely achieved through texture, gesture and feeling, the harmony remains completely chromatically saturated and of a decidedly more modern, post-tonal paradigm.
Following this climax the sonata does begin to wind down; eventually finding itself restating the spaced out, low rumble flurry gestures that the piece began with, coming full circle and perhaps implying and endless loop of bewildering, chromatically saturated, texturally shimmering virtuosity. I love Sciarrino’s first piano sonata and I think it has a completely unique feel to it: Sciarrino manages to contain all the pianistic virtuosity of the late-romantic masters without sacrificing an ounce of modernity or his own idiosyncrasies. Its pace is absolutely breathless once it hits its stride and I’m continually amazed at how he treats the piano as a textural and gestural resource, eschewing the comprehensibility of discrete pitches in order to create overwhelming and beguiling compound sounds and sonorities out of endless flurries, cascades and cycles.
- Jocelyn Campbell, 2025
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