Brighton Year-Round 2025
Luca Luciano Clarinet Solo Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton
Luca Luciano

Genre: Live Music, Music
Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
Renowned international clarinetist Luca Luciano has become a welcome visitor to Brighton. His Solo Clarinet Project is currently promoting the release of his solo CD. A stunning recital
Review
Renowned international clarinetist Luca Luciano has become a welcome visitor to Brighton. His Solo Clarinet Project is currently promoting the release of his solo CD.
He first played two compositions of his own. The Study on Quarter-Tones and Study on Microtonal Trills and Tremolos are both playful and echo Stravinsky’s 1912-14 period (modernist with folk inflections rather than neoclassical) and a vortex of others. One thinks most of all of Luciano Berio, not without nods to Stravinsky himself.
One could listen a good deal to Luciano’s compositions. He enjoys the same melodic sweep you find in Berio; an Italianate warmth always keeps the arid reaches of total serialism at bay, and these eschew that aesthetic. They’re performative, but not virtuosic for their own sake. Luciano privileges communication, affect and discovery.
John Cage’s Sonata is a thing of gulphs and singing fragments, but so early to be lyrical too. Amazingly it dates from 1933, and in its hyper-alert surfaces and atonal take on those Stravinsky pieces we’ll hear next, it’s a portent of things to come. Cage was about to study with Schoenberg, and you can see and feel him battering down the conventional walls of harmony here, as he proclaimed to Schoenberg when the latter said he was unteachable and had no harmony at all. But also prophesying the early Sonatas and Interludes he’d go on to write in the later 1940s. There’s a central section of expressive melancholy that’s treasurable; before we return to the opening’s boppy activity.
Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet date from around 1912 and recall Petroushka but really looking forward to a world beyond the Rite of Spring. They’re perky bright blue chips, soaring and serrated. Darting, present then elusive.
Boulez’s Domaines written 1961-68, could hardly be more different. Using the bass register of the clarinet Boulez and Luciano mine depths of expressiveness not usual in Boulez. It sounds like a hidden essence of Boulez, below the frenetic brilliance of say, Répons in its final moments of repose, or the soaring flutter of Dérive 1. This is early-middle Boulez inspired in part perhaps by Varese. But it’s authentic Darmstadt modernism thrilling with its discoveries.
A version of Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ serves as a sweetener towards the end of the programme. Notable for its sly slides and grace notes it slips into Luciano’s world in this arrangement.
Finally Luciano reverts to his own composition. Fragment #8. This is a gnomic quirk of a piece. Quizzical chirruping yet profound in its refusal to end in an upbeat and fragmentary-sounding break off as the title suggests.
As encore the opening vocalese of Villa Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 sounds ideally transposed, inordinate and solitary. Indeed Villa Lobos wrote pieces like this like his Chorus No. 6 featuring the flute. Heightening the melancholy isn’t all it manages when Luciano breaks into a frantic dance commentary on the main theme. Exhilarating and necessary as he returns to the plangent opening theme.