MARCO BALDINI — Fortunale

A new string quartet by Marco Baldini, performed by Quartetto Maurice: a slow, luminous work named after an archaic Italian word for chance, and for a storm.»Fortunale« was composed between 2024 and 2025 and performed by the Turin-based Quartetto Maurice. It was recorded by Manuel Volpe at Okum Studio, on the Dora river in Rivoli near Turin, in October 2025.Born in 1986 and raised in the countryside near Florence, Baldini co-founded the ensemble Blutwurst with Daniela Fantechi and Edoardo Ricci in 2011, and has played trumpet in works by, or with, Tomaga, Philip Corner, Emmanuel Holterbach, Cyril Bondi and Marja Ahti. He began composing under his own name in 2020, with a series of chamber works for acoustic instruments, among them Vesperi (2023), Fuochi (2024) and Maniera (2024). He has long studied the Hindustani traditions of Dhrupad and Khayal.The title is an archaic Italian word for an event brought about by chance, long used to mean a violent storm. Begun in 2024 as a duo for violin and viola and completed as a quartet, the piece takes its cue from Renaissance and Baroque imagery and from the depiction of storms in early music. During the recording, by chance, a storm broke outside the studio, and its sound found its way onto the tape.Seven sections merge across the two sides, about 38 minutes in all: a slow lament held by long rests, drawing on Medieval, Renaissance and early Baroque music, quotations from Béla Bartók's Fourth String Quartet and Third Piano Concerto, the Japanese shō, spectral harmony and the harmonics of Dhrupad. At times the four strings sound like a single harmonium or shō.Its closest relatives are Harley Gaber's spectral music and the quiet chamber work of the Another Timbre circle.