Years ago Keiji Haino used to be the one boasting of “owning” the entire history of music in some way, and to prove it he would play marathon concerts trying out as many different musical instruments as he possibly could, achieving some sort of mystical omniscience through his very physical performances at these all-you-can-eat buffets. But that was improvisation, of some sort. Reinhold Friedl tries to get to a similar omniscience through composing, recasting existing scores, works, or recordings made by others into new and intense forms, sometimes aided by computers, and always powered by the efforts of the Zeitkratzer crew – a notable crack squad of assassins.
Today on Scarlatti (ZEITKRATZER PRODUCTIONS zkr0028) Friedl takes on the music of Domenico Scarlatti, the Italian composer from the Baroque period, specifically a single piece – the piano sonata K.466 in F minor. Friedl did it for the Rubato dance troupe, not inappropriately as the original composer also borrowed from folk tunes and dance rhythms of Spain (according to some listeners, anyway, who detect a Moorish strain in some pieces and liken others to courtly dance music). However, Scarlatti was also pretty adventurous harmonically, was not averse to creating very busy works for the keyboard, and often broke compositional rules in favour of his own sense of spirit, or play, or simply because it sounded right to him. It’s that aspect that I suppose attracted Friedl to this composer, although you’d never know it from this lugubrious album. Apart from one piece of vaguely-unhinged noise of mixed chords and lower register buffets, the music on Scarlatti is as foreboding as a grey concrete block. When Michael Nyman created his unforgettable reworkings of Purcell for The Draughtsman’s Contract, the joy of the music remained intact, and was not sacrificed on the altar of modernism.
I want to like this record a lot more – Reinhold Friedl has produced impressive music of a superhuman complexity in previous projects, but here the “wild flowers” of Domenico Scarlatti have ended up pressed in the pages of a weighty book, where they will wither away. (01/08/2023)