On our blog, our contemporary composers present their favorite work from our catalogs. This time: Ian Wilson writes about Cadeau by Franco Donatoni.

"I worked in a record shop for part of the summer preceding my doctoral studies – I’m not sure who was responsible for the unusually wide variety of CDs in stock but, due to the large swathes of time I was left untroubled by both colleagues and customers, it was there during those desolate afternoons that I was able for the first time to listen to music by Franco Donatoni.

I was so taken with the fluid sparkle of Donatoni’s music, particularly his chamber work Cadeau (a tuba never sounded so rampant!) that I subsequently bought a number of those big, blue-covered facsimiles of the composer’s manuscripts that Ricordi offered in those days (the late 1980s), and marvelled at their visual correlation to the sounds they pulled from their performers – masses of demi-semiquavers linked by long, wavy, pulse-defying lines that looked to my innocent eye both impractical and yet absolutely right. 

Completed on Christmas Eve 1984, Cadeau opened my mind to the idea of a music which could be fundamentally textural and rhythmic, dancing but with a seemingly fluid, un-pin-downable pulse. Cadeau shifts between instrumental groupings and textural types with the grace and ease of an illusionist; you can’t quite work out how it happens. In some ways it functions as a compendium – here is a group of instruments, and here’s what I can do with them – but of course it is above all a statement of character, a hard-won musical personality that blossomed in the mid-1970s after years of artistic turmoil and challenge.

A few years after my first encounters with his music, I was fortunate to attend a public conversation between Donatoni and the writer David Osmond-Smith. Here the composer was elusive: preferring to talk or even occasionally to sing in French or German he nonetheless entertained his (mainly) English-speaking audience with this discursive virtuosity, skirting around and about questions without really answering them – an interesting foil to his compositions and a nicely consistent one at that.

Donatoni’s music always tickles both my ears and my heart – it excites me whenever I consider any artist who, towards the end of his or her career, puts their foot on the accelerator rather than the brake. Could such a gem as Cadeau have been written by someone in their youth? I hardly think so – the gathering years seem to have lent Donatoni both the energy and the urgency to write with incredible virtuosity and joy, producing music that continues to inspire and amaze."

Ian Wilson, April 17, 2014


Franco Donatoni Cadeau
for 11 instruments
2 Ob. 2 Fg. 2 Cor. Tb. A. Xilomar. Vibr. Glock./Cmp. ( = 1 esec.)
Duration: 10:30’
World Premiere: Touraine, July 1, 1985


Go to Donatoni’s work list

Go to Wilson’s work list