Enrico Gabrielli is a well known italian composer & performer. The kind Italy has very very few of, unfortunately. He plays keys in two bands called Mariposa and Calibro 35 but is also an excellent wind instruments/reed player. He has played with Afterhours, Capossela, Marta Sui Tubi, Mike Patton and many many others.
In his side project Der Maurer (german for "the Masons"), Gabrielli pays homage to some great composers, such as Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen and Giovanni Gabrieli (unrelated) and offers one of his very own compositions as well. A very reed-heavy collection of songs, Gabrielli manages to give compositions that are as old as 1597 a "new music" luster that is in many ways very familiar to the NY downtown scene. The opening 11 minute 1985 Reich composition is a fragmented and heavily multi-layer orchestration of clarinet lines that intertwine and interact subtly echoing Glass and Riley or even Jeremiah Cymerman's all-clarinet record from a few years back. Gabrieli's 1597 work sounds decidedly more European and although I wasn't familiar with this composer before, it sounds like the kind of piece that would have been written for a harpsichord and a baroque court, but is here offered in a rendition that features voices, clarinets and saxophone. Enrico Garbrielli's very own composition also features a number of reeds but brings in organ, wurlitzer, piano and clavinet. The closing 1975 Andriessen piece for clavinet, wurlitzer, sax and drums is the most bombastic and stochastic and relentlessly hammers away for 15 minutes evolving, constructing and deconstructing into an intense avantgarde climax of staccato notes played with the precision of a machine and the subtleties of a human!
The CD comes in a cardboard folding package with a poster inside in which the composer invites us to "unload free cement for modern sound buildings".
This is a prime example of new classical music that pushes the boundaries by taking the old and re-penning it for this day and age. As you might imagine this is definitely not an easy listening record, but Enrico Gabrielli's sophistication and background is way ahead of most of his local contemporaries and he should therefore be followed closely.