ALESSANDRA CELLETTI - The Golden Fly

I believe it's rare, in over 25 years as a music journalist, that I've come across such an immense talent still so far from the attention of the major labels.

Alessandra Celletti is a pianist from Rome. A graduate of the Santa Cecilia conservatory, she later studied under Vera Gobbi Belcredi, with whom she delved deeper into early 20th-century French music.

There would be much to say about her classical career, about how she has "breathed" the sublime, enriching the poetic, delicate notes of Debussy with her singular sensitivity; about how her curiosity led her to revisit the unusual notes of Gurdjeff/De Hartmann, and how, despite her young age, she managed to capture the spirit of Leos Janacek's grassy paths, their intimate, profound meaning. And then there's Erik Satie. Those "Gymnopédies" performed with devotion and passion on a memorable album from some years back ("Esoterik Satie", Kha, 2000), which pushed the so-called "reference editions" onto lower shelves.

She has even ventured into a tender embrace of minimalism, interpreting Philip Glass and reinventing him in a contemporary key, demonstrating here that the apparent antithesis between minimal and baroque — so central to the linguistic dialectic of visual art in recent years — can be brilliantly resolved by the power of the symbol, reminding us once again how much faster and more avant-garde poets are than philosophers, linguists and philological analysts of every stripe and discipline.

I came to know Alessandra, both musically and in person, only very late. My own fault. I'd stumbled across her on her Myspace site during the idle days of midsummer (unusually crowded, for such a complex artist) and, intrigued by compositions taken from a CD she'd just released, in which she mused on angels and wings, I went to hear her live in Milan, at Villa Reale. From that moment on I've had the good fortune to delve deeper into her poetics and to track down all her records.

Indeed, running in parallel — or rather interwoven like an arabesque inlay with her career as a classical performer — Alessandra Celletti reveals herself to be a composer of extraordinary talent and grace. Light years away from silly, superficial new-age suggestions, from making a means into an end, Celletti's poetics seem to pick up the conversation right where Satie, Debussy and Ravel left off.

After the furious, urgent linguistic explorations of the second half of the twentieth century, a space rediscovered for music. Rich in symbolism and in ecstatic, aesthetic exploration. Contemplation. A duty to beauty.

This is her new album of compositions for solo piano. Divided into three suites, like precious objects of strange shapes kept in different caskets, "The Golden Fly" takes its name from the first collection of pieces, made up of 5 impressions plus a sixth called "Talking To Satie", in which Alessandra pays explicit tribute to the genius of Honfleur.

The style is linguistically very close to Satie in the other pieces too. In terms of emotional affinity, in places, besides the classical composers mentioned above, we find echoes of Dustin O'Halloran's solo work, or of the inspired pastoral sonatas of Rick Wakeman's "County Airs".

The next 7 pieces are gathered under "Metals", elemental forces. The pieces, or impressions, though each different from the others, follow one another creating a kind of enchanted atmosphere; we feel surrounded by the piano's natural reverberations in a hypnotic continuum where time comes out the loser, overflowing with pathos and suggestion.

"The Silk Road": impressions and arabesques on the ancient Silk Road close out one of the most moving, poetic, engrossing albums of this now-fading 2007.

I really have no idea how Alessandra Celletti will manage to improve on a masterpiece like this, to go further, as she has always done, looking back on her work in retrospect. But I'm certain she'll surprise us once again.

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29/12/2007