Fidibus Canere

The Album

The translation of notated signs into living sound must have been a pressing issue even for contemporary performers, and is still more so for twenty-first-century players, however historically informed we might claim to be. For, in the attempt to bridge the gap between the past and the present, we cannot disregard the way in which current technical and technological standards shape both our and our audience’s listening habits.

Trained both as a chamber musician and as a music scholar, I have come to my first solo recording after a lengthy and rewarding experience as the leader of Prometeus – a vocal-instrumental ensemble based in my homeland of Sardinia, which specialised in Hispanic music from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Two former members of Prometeus, Alessandro Puggioni and Davide Pili, have contributed to the present recording too. The help of these extraordinary string players, with whom I have shared for years many musical thoughts and feelings, has rendered the difficult task of reconciling old aesthetic ideals and modern interpretative desiderata somewhat easier.

What I present here to the public is, furthermore, a CD dressed in ‘ecological’ clothing. Thanks to the expertise and musicianship shown by the sound engineer Alessandro Simonetto in the recording process, the subsequent addition of effects or artificial reverberation has proven unnecessary. The result is a sound as close as possible to the one a listener would hear while sitting in the concert hall, a few metres from the musicians on stage.

Alberto Sanna © 2014