MUSICWEB:
It’s splendid to have a single disc devoted to the piano music of Castiglioni. We’ve seen that Thomas Adès has included Come io passo l’estate in his wide-ranging EMI New CD 557051-2 (which also includes Nancarrow, Kurtág, Busoni and Grieg, amongst others) but such discs as Sarah Nicholls has now compiled are very much a rarity.

Cangianti is a tightly-argued, compact eleven-minute work written in 1959. It is composed of sub-clauses of tremendous colour and complexity, full of flurries in the middle register and some fortissimo outbursts. Decisive treble and bass oppositional motifs join with considerable command of dynamic variations to produce a work of real distinction. Tre Pezzi (1978) is curious. In his erudite sleeve-note Michael Finnissy wonders whether they represent a "parodistic exorcism" citing Messiaen, Webern and the Second Viennese School generally. The first (marked "Sweet") certainly has a flurry of birdsong and occupies an insistent, staccato-laced sound-world. And the third is kinetic and leapingly fractious.

Come io passo l’estate followed five years after the Three Pieces and stands at a distinct remove from it. Simpler and more clearly descriptive it consists of ten "diary" entries describing a trip in the Italian Alps. There are just hints of Ragtime in the first, jaunty and rhythmically incisive, and some moments of neo-classicism as well. La Valle del Clamin takes us to some vertiginous heights with rather abrupt, then more vigorous, trills. The most amusing of the postcards, the eighth, illustrates the slow snoring of Antonio Ballista (the work’s first performer) asleep in the cells of a police station. The sleepy chords are wickedly evocative. These pictures are compressed into a very small canvas and make their mark with pictorial directness, like a Picasso cartoon in the case of the Fantasma del Castello I Presule – all forty seconds of it.

Dulce Refrigerium is a six-movement suite that pays obeisance to nineteenth century procedures in a highly sophisticated way. There’s a salute to Beethoven’s Les Adieux sonata as well as a remarkable seventeen-second sliver of a Chorale to end the brief suite. The Sonatina fuses some of these ideas – a kind of lineage surveyed and transformed – with a swinging Ländler second movement.

The recorded sound is commendably clear yet warm and Nicholls explores these diverse works with a surety and finesse that are admirable – and truly winning.
Jonathan Woolf

THE WIRE:
The objectivity of post-darmstadt modernism hangs over everything in Noccolò Castiglioni's music, but through this prism he's free to express anything he wants. There's florid decoration owing much to the vocal acrobatics of Italian opera; references to Baroque and classical keyboard stylings abound everywhere, and Castiglioni even plunders ragtime in one piece, a cource most post-serial composers would regard as trivial. The ragtime reference occurs in How I Spent My Summer (1983), a diary-like composition that meanders in a stream of consciousness through the music that engaged him one summer. Echoes of Satie and Schoenberg also waft by. The early Cangianti (1959) is a severely abstract and magnificently visceral study of whacked then tickled piano textures; later pieces like Tre Pezzi (1978) typify Castiglioni's fascination with material stripped back to obsessively repeated notes and playfull trills. British pianist Sarah Nicolls has a ball.
Philip Clark

PARIS TRANSLANTIC:
Niccolò Castiglioni was born in Milan in 1932 and died there in 1996. Between 1958 and 1965 he was a regular visitor to the fabled Darmstadt summer school, and from 1966 to 1970 a visiting professor of composition in the USA, where he taught in Ann Arbor, Seattle and San Diego. The first piece on offer in this fine representative selection of his piano music, splendidly played by Sarah Nicolls,Cangianti, dates from 1959. Vintage Darmstadt, you might guess ­ and you wouldn't be far off the mark, but it's hardly a frosty exercise in total serialism à laBoulez's Structures. On the contrary, it's closer to some of Luc Ferrari's piano music of the mid 50s, a personal take on serialism filtered through the whole history of the repertoire, tracing a line back from the hysterical virtuosity of the Stockhausen Klavierstücke via Webern to expressionistic Schoenberg to Beethoven to the baroque masters the composer apparently enjoyed so much. No traces of neoclassicism, though (which can't always be said of Ferrari). There's a bit of a gap between Cangianti and the Tre Pezzi ­ nearly twenty years, to be precise, during which time Castiglioni, rather like Donatoni, was moving towards his own personal and utterly irony-free version of postmodernism. The "Kinderlied ohne Worte" is, as Michael Finnissy rightly points out in his liners, distinctly Webernian, but lest you get the impression it's all getting heavy and Germanic, the busy figuration and fondness for upper register arabesques also point towards Messiaen and Ravel. Four years later, and the ten little miniatures that make upComo io passo l'estate ("How I spend the summer") look even further afield, to ragtime ("Arrivo a Tires") and Gershwin ("La Fossa del Lupo"), via Satie, Debussy and Scriabin. If the major seventh and minor ninth were the intervals of choice for the Darmstadt avant-garde, Castiglioni does his level best here to bring back the good old schmaltzy third, and pianist Nicolls is right to recommend this to kids learning the piano: it's entertaining stuff, technically challenging but rewarding and beautifully heard (check out the ravishing chords on "Antonio Ballista dorme in casa dei Carabinieri"). In 1984's Dulce Refrigerium (Sechs Geistliche Lieder) the composer seems to be looking even further back, to Beethoven's famous Lebewohl horn calls (Ligeti's Horn Trio, written just a couple of years earlier, not surprisingly also explores the reference) ­ material of great significance for the composer, it would appear, since it also reappears in the distinctly late Beethovenian Sonatina written that same year. By this time the postmodernism seemed to be kicking in with a vengeance, though: where the Tre Pezzi fused diverse stylistic influences to perfection and the tiny vignettes of Come io passo approached them with simplicity and respect, it's harder to pinpoint the composer's real personality in the 1984 works (maybe that's intentional ­ mid 80s Donatoni is, after all, also good at playing "Will The Real Composer Please Stand Up?"). Happily, the Beethovenian soul searching is dispensed with in the toccata-like flourishes of the disc's closer, HE (1990), which goes back to the Darmstadt major seventh and its inversion, the noble semitone and gives them a workout both Bartókand Reich would have been proud of. There's not enough Castiglioni out on disc,so this one comes warmly recommended.
Dan Warburton