During this past month, I made videos of the Six Caprices for violin by Salvatore Sciarrino. I’m very proud of them and I hope you’ll listen and watch. They’re very beautiful music.

I first played several of these back when I was starting to play a lot of contemporary music. The Capricci mean a lot to me and I feel strongly about the expression and sound world of this music. There’s a lot I can say and explain but I’m not in the mood to write it down, so for now, I’ll post the interview I did at the West Cork Festival in Ireland after I’d performed the six of them. While they certainly draw somewhat from Paganini’s famous caprices, I feel Sciarrino’s caprices have a feeling of wonder, mystery, and sparkle that comes from the mercurial combination of notes, noise, and silence-as-environment. The effect overall is more Mendelssohnian than noisy, and silence is the essential ocean-like world that sounds emerge from and sink back into.

My interpretation of Sciarrino’s harmonics is that they mean different things as written: some just produce noise and some are harmonics that will sound as pitches, which give the music a radiance and elements of melody rather than an ongoing pile-on of gestures.

Youtube playlist of all six Caprices is here.
I will probably make an audio recording someday but I’m actually very happy with the videos for now, as the detail and physicality are very enjoyable in this medium.