The world premiere of Lorenzo Pagliei’s  A.L.M.A. for cello and orchestra will take place on September 24 in Florence as part of the Play It! festival. The Orchestra della Toscana and the cellist Francesco Dillon will be conducted by Francesco Lanzillotta. The work takes its name from A.L.M.A. (Atacama Large Millimiter/submillimiter Array) the world’s most powerful radio telescope capable revealing aspects of space and time that are invisible through other telescopes.

The composer writes: “When we observe the universe, we are awestruck by what we see and in some way it seems as though we disappear as individuals. We sense the immensity of the cosmos that appears infinitely distant from our daily life…In that moment no word can yet be uttered: we can only contemplate what we see and attempt to understand it through intuition. That is the realm of stupor and dizziness, of the non-verbal, a realm that music knows and is able to evoke. 

A.L.M.A. puts into music two ways of being immersed in sound: on the one hand, the universal, the impersonal, the sonic environment, and on the other, the lyric, the personal, the cultural. The cello is no longer a >soloist< but one who finds oneself immersed in a boundless and unknown space in which it travels observing mysterious phenomena from various distances. In this infinity it will re-evoke a voice of an extremely dilated lyricism and the story will take another course.”

A.L.M.A.
for cello and orchestra
2 (II also Picc).2.2.2 /2.2.1.- / Perc (2) / Strings (8.6.4.4.2)
Duration: 20’