The Most Beautiful Sounds Next to Silence

For five minutes or so, this dedication to 18th-century Italian opera and sacred-music composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi sounds like a respectfully operatic and relatively straight tribute to its subject – then Italian drummer Michele Rabbia's muffled-hoofbeat drumming begins to edge in. Though the music regularly returns to Pergolesi's arias and passages from his Stabat Mater (handled by the classically schooled Neopolitan vocalist de Vito with understated aplomb), the early material is used as a jumping-off point for various improvisations – from the unobtrusive melodic twists of French pianist Francois Couturier and German cellist Anja Lechner, to de Vito's whoops, gasps, and scat-like squirmings. Watery sounds and ghostly cello swirls usher in Amen/Fac ut Portem; Sinfonia for Violoncello is a showcase for Lechner; Chi Disse ca la Femmena is given a suitably playful treatment by de Vito at first, before becoming an exciting uptempo chase for cello and voice. It's not as radically deconstructive as Uri Caine's takes on classical music and opera, and both opera and improv listeners may find much to enjoy in it.

(https://www.theguardian.com)