‘Dir – in dir’ by Stefano Gervasoni for six singing voices and string sextet is based on a text by physician and mystic Angelus Silesius from the 17th century. The composer Stefano Gervasoni, born in 1962 in Bergamo in Northern Italy, in 2003 set texts from Silesius’s ‘Cherubinischer Wandersmann’ to music and contrasted them a year later with a string sextet. Also for the second piece on the CD, ‘descdesesasf’, he was inspired by German lyric, Paul Celan’s ‘Atemwende’. The central theme in both works is not the accurate composing of exactly sung lyrics, but the resolution, the dwindling away of words in the music until both fuse into an inseparable, almost transcendental whole. Stefano Gervasoni began his compositional studies in 1980, encouraged by Luigi Nono. He read music at the Milan conservatory, with György Ligeti in Hungary and Paris, where he teaches today himself composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse. Gervasoni has given numerous courses, for example in Darmstadt, Tokyo, Shanghai, at the Columbia and Harvard University. Important artistic encounters connect him with Brian Ferneyhough, Peter Eötvös and Helmut Lachenmann to name only few. The British Exaudi vocal ensemble that has striven since its foundation in 2002 to perform contemporary music, sings with touching sound beauty and pureness. The international press has enthused: ‘… the extraordinary ensemble of vocal virtuosi’ (The Sunday Times); ‘the dazzle of Exaudi’s vocal pyrotechnics’ (Financial Times) ; or ‘deftly convincing performances of dizzyingly complex works’ (The Guardian).
