The late Charles Camilleri was not only Malta’s leading composer, but one with an international reputation for a wide range of musical styles from opera to solo piano music – and from light and frothy works to the deep, resonant pieces on this release. Most of his work in some form also incorporates or is influenced by folk tunes from Malta and the surrounding Mediterranean area – music which informs the contemporary through its use of polyrhythms, tone clusters, microtones, improvisation and many so called ‘new’ techniques. Apart from Camilleri’s jolly addition to the Paganini Caprice catalogue with the duet ‘Paganiana’ the works here are informed by Camilleri’s views on the cosmos and its spiritual or philosophical meanings – its structural identity with music, with the equations of ancient Greece and modern physics. The extended multimovement pieces here use tone rows, minimalism, palindromes, pentatonic scales and so on, giving considerable variety in sound and structure; all deserve to be better known and to form part of the standard 20th century repertoire.
