V SOMRAK ZVONI for mixed choir
V somrak zvoni, na gozdove pala je tema;
tiha pesem, ko da hoče od sveta..
Proč… in tam bi onemela tam bi ugasnila
in to sivo, težko žalost v večnost potopila…
Tolling in twilight, on the woods darkness has fallen;
a silent chant, as if it would detach from the world.
Far… and there it yearns to fall silent, there, to die out
and sink into eternity
this grey, heavy sadness…
(Translation from italian by Stefano Pierini)
V SOMRAK ZVONI is a composition for choir with accompaniment of lithopone, particularly a model built by the slovene sculptor Pavel Hrovatin; the instrument is made of eight stone discs tuned to different pitches with very differentiated timbres, they were hit by two percussion players with big mallets producing a unique and magic sonority. The language of this piece is much in debt with the great vocal tradition of the second half of Twentieth Century, especially connected to György Ligeti’s and Luigi Nono’s works; the polyphonic texture of the piece is very dense and the lines are highly chromatic, resulting in a thick and moving mass punctuated by the lithopone colours. The text is provided by a juvenile poem by Srečko Kosovel, a great slovene poet lived in the beginning of the last century and prematurely passed way, that belongs to the ‘impressionistic’ phase of his poetic output the themes of which are binded to the vast concern and suffering of his time and of the tragedy of life in a more general sense.