A Continuance -- Dino Saluzzi - Part 2

"El Encuentro", released in 2010 from ECM, is Saluzzi's "composer" recording. A strange thing for me to claim, as it is actually a live radio concert recording from Amsterdam, 2009. Yet, his pieces, arranged for orchestra, extend his personal whisper into a collective sign of whispers -- a forest of strings, a sea of open sound that sings the whispers of many as a sign of the singular, a united front, one could claim, against silence itself (which is curious, since a whisper both acknowledges the silence it breaks open and succumbs to it by risking that it not be heard above anything). The first track, "Vals de los dias" (Waltz of the Day), arranged for bandoneon, violincello, and orchestra, begins almost aggressively, with large sweeping waves of strings that shimmer and dissolve as soon as Saluzzi's instrument appears, And yet, he disappears just as quickly, as the orchestra builds a staircase of sound on air into the empty sky, then hovers lovingly over Saluzzi's lone figure (I imagine, anyway) bent in solemnity over his instrument.

Three minutes into this fifteen and a half minute piece, and Saluzzi the player has given us 20 seconds of sound, while Saluzzi the composer has arranged the sky to his liking. And then, at 3:01, a bandoneon solo, a hush against the silence, no strings for at least 30 seconds, and then they descend like angels to gently lift him into the same sky that they occupy. Saluzzi's sounds begin to dance slightly, and weave, and nearly (but not quite) soar. Not quite because at some unknown point (I can't tell where the sounds distinguish themselves) Anja Lechner's cello rises up and becomes the sun in this day-waltz. Saluzzi flutters in the sun's shadow, and then he's gone. The cello has become high noon, not the typical mournful voice we have all agreed it must always be. No, the sun can't be sad, else how could it actually rise before us?

And then the sky reappears in the form of strings that can only dramatize the day, the cello and bandoneon swaddled in the blankets of these strings, as the day is the protection we seek under cover of night, under cover of time, under cover of the world. the strings dissipate, the whisper returns, the day continues, and then fades in a glory of movement.

My guess is that Saluzzi -- and this guess is my poetry of this moment -- sought to express the day in all its glory, all its silence, all its ever lastingness. I mean, what did you wake up to today?