Luci Mie Traditrici

Avant-garde Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino's (b. 1947) 1998 opera—a chamber piece lasting little more than an hour, the title of which essentially translates as “My Traitorous Eyes”—is loosely based on the life of Don Carlo Gesualdo, a 16th-century composer who had his wife and her lover killed after discovering them in a compromising situation. Here, the characters are labeled merely as the Duke, the Duchess, and the Guest, to which is added a fourth figure, an unnamed servant. The libretto serves up a spare retelling of the love triangle and subsequent tragedy, while the music itself is also austere, with an instrumental ensemble blurting out spikes of sound between pregnant silences. The vocal lines consist primarily of long-held, piercing notes followed by ornamentation with a vaguely Renaissance bent (anchored in a 16th-century chanson by Claude Le Jeune). Sciarrino himself declared this production from the 2010 Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte in Montepulciano to be definitive, and certainly the orchestra (the Ensemble Algoritmo), conductor (Marco Angius), soloists (Nina Tarandek, Christian Miedl, Roland Schneider, and Simon Bode), and director (Christian Pade) prove to be committed advocates. Presented in PCM stereo, DVD extras include a “making-of” featurette. Unfortunately, however, Luci Mie Traditrici is not really an approachable work, likely only to appeal to a subset of devotees of modern music. Optional. (F. Swietek)