A decade after Fausto Romitelli's death, the Italian composer is still a far from familiar name. Despite a string of successes at numerous European festivals throughout his career, Romitelli's music is rarely performed. The London première of the composer's swansong was long overdue, and it was only right that the work should receive a first-class performance at the hands of the London Sinfonietta.
The music began before the performance itself started, with sporadic electronic pulses resounding through the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Every aspect was calculated to draw the spectator into Romitelli's multi-sensory world; for this piece, the term 'listener' seems insufficient. After all, the composer wanted the piece to be "an experience of total perception... a magma of sounds, shapes and colours". His own notes for the piece describe music in visual terms, and vice versa, casting it as synaesthesia writ large. With surround sound, video screens, electronics and live performers, this piece immerses the audience to almost hallucinatory effect.
Perhaps the best way to describe the work is as a journey into the unconscious. Romitelli plays with your sensory perception, gradually attuning the audience to his particular sonic and visual world: an introductory section establishes the upper and lower limits of the piece, and the harmonic realm in which the piece unfolds. By the time the soprano soloist begins to sing, we are encapsulated within a surreal, sci-fi realm, accustomed to the keening glissandi and thrumming bass guitar. Romitelli begins by holding the audience at a distance, before gradually pulling back the veil as more pointed
Energy is what connects music and light; the more agitated the ensemble, the more animated the video screens. Each screen initially explores light in an abstract manner, with pulsing balls of light: gradually, the images coalesce into identifiable objects, such as microscopic images or discarded rubbish in a rotating cylinder. Sound is projected as light, while the libretto (by Kenka Lènkovich) is constructed around dynamic imagery.
Although Romitelli's score embraces a broad stylistic range, he has a distinctive musical voice. His music bears the traces of the French spectral school (he worked alongside Gérard Grisey and Hugues Dufourt for three years in the 1990s), with resonant bass notes and a brightness to his harmonies. Over the course of the hour-long work, this language is the basis for references to electro-pop, blues (complete with sultry chanteuse) and rock music. However, nothing ever feels out of character: there is a natural progression throughout the piece. Romitelli gradually introduces darker, moodier colours in his orchestration, adding increasingly raw timbres. Eventually, after intensifying all parameters, sensory overload is reached: the screens shut off, the ensemble cease to play, and we are left with a drone.