London- We are pleased to introduce “Partenope” (LUC01 CD, 2011), the brand-new, six-tracks EP album by Luca Luciano, “Masterful Clarinet!” by Musician Magazine. The project has been realised in collaboration with the sound engineer, DJ and producer Massimo Luciano. The album is available for physical and digital distribution world-wide via CD-Baby and it is also available on iTunes, Amazonand and Napster. Continuing the journey started with the album “Clarinet” (MCPS 2008), the compositions included in this release are also part of an on-going academic research that focuses on extended techniques for the contemporary repertoire and new music for solo clarinet that Luciano has also presented during the masterclasses and workshops he holds around the UK and overseas (Italy, Brazil, etc).

Luciano’s aesthetics is inspired by the Italian intellectual Umberto Eco and aims at presenting 21st Century music that, paraphrasing Eco’s view on post-modernism, ”neither repudiates nor imitates either his modernist or post-modernist parents and has the music of the past centuries under his back but not on his back.” The core of the “Clarinet Solo Project”, is made of the two Sequenze premiered at the Bristol Cathedral in June 2009 and “Rondo’ Contemporaneo” premiered in August 2010 at St Martin in the Fields in London part of their New Music Series. Inspired by the famous line of Gustav Mahler’s, “A symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything”, the Sequenze include sections of notated and improvised music where a “sequence” of propositions are developed by the musician during the piece. During the performance the clarinet is pushed to the edge using a wide range of styles and expressions in an imaginative journey around the world from Western European music to Afro-American or folkloristic music of Southern Italy, from contemporary classical music with chromatic and angular-shaped lines to heartfelt melodies. The sequenze were first recorded in 2007 and have been revised, re-performed and re-edited during the studio sessions of June 2010.

The programme is completed by a series of short, written pieces where a variety of techniques are applied (multi-phonics, growl/flutter, glissato, quarter-tones, “timbral-trillos”, etc) on scores that may well feature other effects (as in the tarantella section of “Rondo’ Contemporaneo”), or the use of the Neapolitan minor scale (as on Sequenza #1 and Rondo’ Contemporaneo) or even a short section of serial music (as on “Fragment #5”). Jazz Impromptu is a freely improvised track that includes short quotations from some of Charlie Parker’s famous tunes as a homage to the American saxophonist. The music also shows the potentiality of the instrument endorsed by Luciano (a full Boehm System clarinet with a low Eb) with extra keys and rings that has attracted the attention of critics and enthusiasts alike.