Antonio Bibalo Portrait – Stavanger Symphony Orchestra

A spontaneous composer

Antonio Bibalo is a spontaneous composer who use everything that can be used, “because art is free and should be free,” as he himself has proclaimed. “I am neither avant-garde nor conservative. I have tried to be a composer for my own era.” It is a matter of creative motivation; a mature artist impatiently searching for a completely valid musical expression.

Cikada Ensemble and conductor Christian Eggen performs Bibalo’s “4 Morceaux pour 7 musiciens”, a colourful tapestry of sound with an innovative melodic pattern, containing humour and lyricism framed by a serious undertone of drama. “Raccanto d’una stagione alta” – here performed by Bjørg Værnes and Anders Brunsvik – for cello and piano was inspired by an event in the composer’s youth that was branded in his memory – the impending atmosphere of doom felt at the brink of World War II, when the old, secure world seemed to disappear in a moment. In “Cantico for soprano and tape”, Bibalo’s imaginative treatment of sound comes into its own, with a text pulled from Dante’s “Inferno”. Last, but not least, the violinist Peter Herresthal, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and conductor Alexander Dmitriev, performs Bibalo’s “Concerto Allegorico”, a work that can be described as a confirmation of life with an echo of burning high romanticism.