Innovative Flutist Fabbriciani Turns Convention on Its Ear

Wednesday night at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Italian flutist Roberto Fabbriciani created nothing short of an expansive redefinition of an instrument too often stereotyped as a tool of pretty romantic inklings and Baroque formality.

In effect, Fabbriciani burrows inside his instrument to discover new sounds and techniques, while venturing outside convention. His vocabulary includes aggressive breathing techniques, artfully manipulated timbres, extreme vibrato and percussive effects on the pads, all in the service of musicality rather than effects for their own sake.

A prevailing theme in the program, consisting largely of pieces written expressly for him by Italian composers, was art-about-art references. Most of the works had tape accompaniments, and the vocabulary of taped sounds arose primarily from the flute itself. That was the case with “I binary del tempo” by Nicola Sani, which was framed by the sound of a heartbeat. Sani was also on hand, behind the mixing board, as the evening’s sound director.

Echoes of the past also played a role. In Ennio Morricone’s textural study “Cadenza,” murky echoes of material by Frescobaldi (1583-1643) were woven into the textural fabric of the piece, while the opener, Aldo Clementi’s Passacaglia, based its thickening plot of layered sounds on snippets from the flute repertory of Mozart, Bach and Schubert. Morricone’s piece held particular intrigue, in part because this composer, best known for his film scores for Fellini and Hollywood, has long stoked the passions of his alter ego as a probing composer of concert music, without much credit.

The late dean of Italian modernists, Luigi Nono, made Fabbriciani the dedicatee of “Das Atmende Klarsein,” for contrabass flute and tape, which was the evening’s most abstract, uncompromising work. Even here, though, sensual aspects ruled over brainy ritual.

In the end, Fabbriciani’s recital was a meditative experience, in its own abidingly experimental, sentiment-resistant way.