A European without frontiers, Karl Fiorini (born 1979) studied in Malta with Charles Camilleri and Joseph Vella before moving to London, working with Diana Burrell at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama (2004–05). He completed his doctorate programme with Michael Zev Gordon at the Royal College of Music (2006–15). Establishing the Malta Spring Festival in Valletta in 2007, he settled in Paris the following year, immersing himself in French culture, aesthetics and way of life.

‘Art must reflect the society of its time. A true artist captures the Spirit of their Age’, Fiorini said in 2003. Wrestling for change, questioning perceptions and values, rejecting complacency, going out on a limb, and getting grass to grow in rocky landscapes, is Fiorini’s grail. Beethoven’s piano sonatas and Chopin’s études are his daily catechism, referencing his thinking and conversation. He upholds roots. But ‘new winds blow’. ‘Far from being anchored in the past’, the Spanish-Lebanese poet Ana Bocanegra Briasco observes, he’s always ‘opening up channels, always looking for new ways in which, without surrendering to fashion, he feels free to do what he believes in and stay true to the music and to himself’.¹ ‘I compose what I feel is right and what comes from within.’

With the youthful Trio Lamina (2002), two violin concertos (June 2007 and December 2011 respectively) and the neo-post-Romantic Second Symphony premiered in Milan at Expo 2015, his music ‘detached’ itself from Mediterraneanised nascency, venturing into an arena, as he puts it, ‘marked by a sense of self-mockery and eclecticism, without lapsing into cliché’. Analysis and graphs objectify the bricks-and-mortar of his invention. But allegory, subtexts, the what-might-be/what-if factor, the imagery of words and brush-strokes, are needed to begin to suggest (inadequately) the impact, the psychological profiling, the maze of tensions, the frissons of feeling and glance coursing through what he is writing today. Teasingly we are invited into a Pandora’s box of paradoxes and contradictions. In this counterpoint of vignettes and life meetings, are intense states of being, volcanic storms and wild oceans, a man caressing and cursing sound and rhythm, who twists and tortures innocent motifs and strands of memory into climaxes and explosions of terrifying confrontation. The voice is visceral and sensuous, lean yet generous, a nuit blanche ride where the innermost goes hand-in-hand with raw savagery and snarling cynicism, troubled desires and high-wire risk-taking.

Fiorini’s output ranges from orchestral, opera and large-scale vocal settings to chamber music and solo pieces. Three European Capitals of Culture have commissioned or programmed his works: Marseille 2013, Mons 2015, Valletta 2018. ‘Music in itself’, Fiorini maintains, ‘cannot express anything, but it’s a language everyone understands or can understand.’ Relatively early he asserted that ‘to create a method that informs the piece itself, not simply the context of its production’ was one of his ‘central compositional philosophies’. ‘My musical language’, he noted in 2013, ‘cannot be labelled as either tonal or atonal, although strong tonal centres are prevalent [without returning to functional harmony] … it has never been my intention to be an “experimental” or an “avant-garde” composer.’ Not all the people he cites as inspirational – nonconformists, often challengers of authority – are household familiars: Alexander Krein, Samuil Feinberg, Mieczysław Weinberg, Vsevolod Zaderatsky, Valentin Silvestrov. Literature, like painting and languages, has been a consuming passion from the start.

Trio Lamina

Lento libero/quarter note [crotchet] = 126 - Quasi improvisazione - Tempo primo - 

Cadenza  [Libero ma poco lento] - Lento - Allegro con fuoco

Trio Lamina (2002) – lamina in the sense of foil, veneer, leaf, layer – was Fiorini’s first attempt towards consolidating cogent new dimensions of structure and harmony, crafting a whole out of successive smaller sections. It co-won the 2004 Alea III International Composition Competition (University of Boston). Though cast in one movement, its six sub-sections display evident traits of Bartókian arch form, its penultimate lento – ‘a nocturnal quasi-tenebrous scene’ with slow moving Mussorgskian chords and octaves on the piano (quasi ‘con mortuis in lingua mortua’) preceded by a transitioning cadenza for clarinet offset by violin double-note tremoli and glissandi – hinting further at the Hungarian’s ‘night music’ manner. Globally the macrostructure follows a fast–slow–fast scheme, the ‘finale’ in the guise of a modified, temporally more dynamic reflection of incidents in the first part. Pondering, juxtaposing and mutating material, braiding mosaics of emotion, contribute to its persona.

Les Âmes effleurée

Reflets flous

Gallic in sonority and ambience, these two concert studies for piano – Les Âmes effleurées (2007) and Reflets flous (2008), dating from the end of Fiorini's time in London – 'hint in a nuage-like way,' he says, 'at my early coquetteries with France, its language, literature, people'. In the case of the first, facets even are drawn from Chopin’s Second Ballade. But not their means of organisation. These are in fact complex examples of Fibonacci sequencing where each integer is the sum of the two preceding ones – a ‘nautilus shell’ construct (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 …) reaching back to Pingala’s Sanskrit Chandaḥśāstra. In 2013 the composer defined Les Âmes effleurées (Souls Touched) as ‘the Interval of the fifth, the Unfolding of Form’: ‘In this piece [measured in crotchets, and based on a varied hexachord and four-note sequence] I explore the expansion and contraction of the dyad … The structural essence consists of multiple Fibonacci series, determining the beats and number of bars … The composition is divided into five sections.’ Fibonacci ordering generates inevitably ‘a kind of symmetry and a unifying structure, a proscenium arch around the whole composition’ through which the numeric sequences can ‘perform’. ‘Enlargement’ and ‘cascade’ techniques play an audible role in phase lengthening.²

‘Owing most to Debussy’s harmonic palette, particularly his practice of retaining pitches between chords’, Reflets flous (Blurred Reflections) subdivides into eleven expressively rarefied sections, measured in semiquavers, ‘the motion from one note to the next governed by an intervallic principle of either a major or minor third, and the inversion of these intervals to ones of a major or minor sixth’. ‘Metaphorically speaking’, Fiorini argues, ‘the addition of another part in the piano’s lower register [end of the first (un-barred) line, 33 seconds in] acts like a pebble, dropped in the calm water of a lake, thus blurring the clarity of the surface. As further pebbles are released, ripples abound, and the surface becomes hazier. As the threshold of distortion approaches, so the music takes on an independent character.’

Piano Trio

Grave - Allegro - Lento/Libero [quasi cadenza/come improvisazione] - Lento molto - Allgro molto energico assai

The Piano Trio (2005) closes a chapter, 'a musical journey', begun with Lamina. ‘Compelled to search for a new compositional approach, this work showed me that it was possible to use primary numbers to create phrases. In addition, I also used hexachords to generate a modal grammar. Each of the seven distinct sections is monothematic, using the same mode in either its prime or retrograde versions, or through inversions to develop the material.’ ‘Influenced by the folk music of North Africa’ – a return to hunting grounds sourced previously albeit differently by Camilleri, articulating Fiorini’s belief that ‘today we must think globally but act locally’ – the unifying scale, binding the whole organically, is based on the notes B–C#–D–E♭–F#–G, applied horizontally or vertically with cross-sectioned transpositions and pitchshifted segmentation stratifying the soundscape. Temporally and longitudinally the Piano Trio is broader than Lamina, by some two minutes and 89 bars, with its incidents ordered otherwise. There are still, nevertheless, shared horizons. The unaccompanied grave cello introduction; slow-moving, blue-iced piano chords; ejaculated energy; the violin glissandi of the first cadenza. The piano’s dusky, scarcely sounded, near-static presence in the extended lento pages – semiquaver quintuplets, con tristezza, floated high above angélus bells and subterranean ‘pebble’ drops, their chiselled regularity expressively near-faceless – intriguingly metamorphises the ‘lingua mortua’ paragraphs of three years previously. That this episode melts seamlessly into the Golden Section region of the inclusive design, paralleling Lamina, is a matter of unforced natural placement, a hushed case of architectural dramaturgy.

By this stage of Fiorini’s development, ‘method’ composition – the serialisation of pitch, rhythm, phrases and perpendiculars – was showing signs of impeding rather than liberating his creativity. ‘I had begun to notice that I was no longer making musical decisions according to the pure pleasure of the inner ear, but, rather, by heartlessly abiding to purely intellectual procedures … After a devoted engagement with the Fibonacci series, I came to understand that [the centrifugal force that] had once fuelled my music, indeed, providing much of the musical content, was now obstructing its growth … What had merely been deterministic was now dogmatic. It was at this point that I needed to retreat and reflect on my own compositional processes, and even my own identity as a thinker in the Western tradition, caught (as we all are), between the lure of a single, over-arching, endlessly reassuring pattern, and the elusive sublime of irrational imagination … As a way of re-presenting my music to myself, I felt I had to revisit tonality and assimilate it into my harmonic language, without returning to functional harmony. I decided to do this by basing my music on the equal temperament scale, where any chord [or cluster] can be analysed tonally.’³ Seminal scores from this period included the Second Violin Concerto, recorded in 2012, and Cadavre Exquis for voices and ensemble (‘collaborating with previous versions of myself’).

Piano Sonata No 1

I half note [minim] = 60 - II Lento assai - III Agitato

Cyclic and concentrated, the First Piano Sonata (2017)4, Fiorini says, 'shifts its attention elsewhere, unmistakably Eastwards'. Not so much the Oriental East as Teutonic worlds East of Paris. Liszt’s Weimar, Berg’s Vienna, Bartók’s Budapest, Feinberg’s Moscow. Precipitously difficult, massively gestured, and of a colouring, textural layering and sonic density intrinsically orchestral, three joined chapters – fast, slow, fast, more demarcated than diffused – comprise the single movement continuum. Cross-referenced cells, contoured relationships, taut motivic development, rhythmic metabolism, repetition and reprise determine its profile. Occasionally we meet with paraphrastic nods in the direction of the Liszt B minor Sonata. Now and again lava fields loom where every hammer strike is like a cyclopean flame born of Loki fire (the supercharged left-hand cannonades 13 bars before the central lento assai for instance – V12 thrust). The ‘fine pen’ style of the ruminative central collonade focusses on stranding and catharsis. Overall, small seeds lead to bigger expanses. Inverted/ transposed, the first four notes of the initial ‘subject’ (D–E♭–D–E) become the lengthened lead motif of the Dies irae-suggestive rejoinder. With the lento assai the shape is modified to intimate widening intervals (B♭–A–B–A♭), which then, inverted/transposed/quickened, kick off the finale. A gritty, virtuoso concert piece, rampant battle chargers racing the glory moments.

In the Midst of Things

I Grave - Vivo  II dotted minim [half note] = 52 - Meno mosso -  

III Patetico, ma non troppo - Poco più mosso - Molto più lento  IV Presto - Poco più mosso

‘Was Du in Dir nährst, das wächst’ ('What you nourish within you grows' – Goethe). More spacious and introverted than its companions, 'endeavouring to capture a "state of being"', In the Midst of Things (2019) falls into four independent movements, the second and third linked pivotally. An unusual feature of the scherzo-like second is the rhythmically equalised 64-bar pianissimo epilogue for clarinet, violin and cello (without piano), proportionately two bars shy of the Golden Section juncture. Like Lamina and the Piano Trio, events bud pensively, with a violin monody. And, like the Sonata, they’re pulverised home by a physically dynamic ‘Fiorini boogie’. Again, related binding melodic figures are traceable throughout – drawing on intervallic contractions and expansions of the two primary cells at the start: D–E♭–D♭–B♭–C–D–B / G–B♭–C–A–C#–F#–C. Rhythmically florid linear debate is plentiful. But so, too, is the sense of an orbiting design energised, Beethoven-like, through the tensions, peaks and reposals of blocked/broken chordal progressions spiralling between anchored gravity points. Time-honoured values, 21st century plated.

© 2021

¹ Briasco, Ana Bocanegra, Karl Fiorini Violin Concertos (Métier/Divine Art, 2013).

² Karl Fiorini, The Fibonacci series as a means of organising musical material: a composer’s tool or constraint?,

   RCM DMus thesis, London December 2013.

³ Ibid.

4 A second was completed in May 2021, commisioned by Joanna Delia.