Salvatore Sciarrino’s music has much to do with silence. His works often seem already to have begun when the first sounds become truly audible, as though there were a meta-music playing constantly, which he is able to ‘tune in’ to from time to time. These chamber works, all with enigmatic titles and all of small dimensions (in the longest, Le ragioni delle conchiglie, the composer is ‘tuned‘ in for almost 12 minutes), present us, in a way, with the essence of Sciarrino’s fragile, fleeting world. Silence, or near-silence, is absolutely fundamental; instrumental sounds often resemble the slightest of bas-reliefs on the smooth stone of silence – the title of Il tempo con l’obelisco suggests that a sculptural metaphor is not inappropriate. The noisiest work, oddly enough, is Il silenzio degli oracoli: but as it is also the earliest composition (1975), it could be viewed it as the beginning of a process of increasing ‘muteness’.

Performers must, of course, be completely attuned to this near-silence; their individual contributions must be subsumed into the complex, fragile spider’s web of the whole. The musicians who have come together for this recording are exceptional in their understanding of this and the recording, made at IRCAM by Thierry Bardon, is quite outstanding.