Luigi Dallapiccola – Ciaccona, Intermezzo e Adagio (1945)

A solo cello piece that initially struck me as rather grim and severe, especially compared to the other mature Dallapiccola piece I know, the friendly and lyrical Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera (1952).  But a few listens later, the two pieces didn’t seem so different.  Yes, much of the Ciaccona focuses on loud, dissonant double-stops — but there are also passages like the one two thirds of the way in, a fragmentary barcarolle in which a lyrical atonal line is built around a two-note ostinato that features a hollow natural harmonic, creating the impression of a boat drifting down a river in the mist.  There’s also an intriguing clash of musical languages, the most striking being a sudden burst of C# minor tonality set to French-overture rhythm.  Overall the movement has a rhetorical or ritualistic quality, with no transitions between most of the phrases and short pizzicato gestures that recur unaltered and seem to serve as time markers.

The Intermezzo is brief and aggressive and reminds me a bit of Bartók’s Fourth Quartet (1927), especially since both feature violent attacks on the bottom two strings of the cello.  It does have a certain clunky, almost didactic quality, with its groups of identically articulated quarter notes, sometimes all pizzicato and sometimes all downbows, but there’s also a quiet, pensive middle section that does what twelve-tone music does best:  using the total chromatic set in a way that makes every note feel new, unanticipated and just right.

The Adagio is probably my favorite movement – quiet and mysterious, played entirely with the mute on.  There’s an opening passage based on stacked fifths (starting on low E rather than low C, and thus making reference to the structure of the instrument while still allowing the player to use vibrato), and dissonant dyads that, thanks to the mute, feel like dull echoes of the Ciaccona.  My favorite part is a series of three melodies, all in eighth notes, each of which takes a particular pitch as a sort of interrupted drone and returns to it every other note.  Two of them eventually blossom into something like late-19th-century chromatic tonality, but only briefly before the music gives way to something else — low sul ponticello tremolos or a return to the opening stacked fifths.

Overall a piece that I’m more interested in than excited about, but it does have some beautiful passages.