MUSICA SPARPAGLIATA (2025) | >>Stefano Giannotti – composer, author, director, guitarist and performer<<

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Scattered Music (ALT065) is an ambitious musical project born from the Sinfonia School of Music in Lucca, Italy. Released by Altrock Records and distributed by Ma.Ra.Cash, this album celebrates ten years (2015–2025) of educational and artistic endeavors. It features Orchestra SMS , an ensemble composed of talented young musicians from the school, under the direction of renowned composer and Lucca native Stefano Giannotti, who also arranged the pieces.

The album offers an eclectic repertoire, bridging genres and eras, from the Velvet Underground to Robert Wyatt, Battisti/Panella to the Third Ear Band, Bruno Lauzi to Tuxedomoon, and beyond. This diversity reflects the project’s aim to expand musical horizons and honor both celebrated and lesser-known composers.

Orchestra SMS

Eva Bartolucci, Xhensila Leka: flutes
Domenico Piegaia: clarinet, bass clarinet
Tommaso Barattini: clarinet
Riccardo Santabarbara: violin
Giada Del Grande: voice
Elisa Cheng: electric guitar, voice
Gabriele Stefani, Franco Cheng, Nicolò Paganucci: guitars, voices
Jacopo Di Grazia: guitar, banjo, voice
Enrico Giuntini, Francesca Pezzuti: keyboards, voices
Sofia Paterni: harp
Duccio Nieri: bass guitar
Edgar Gomez: drums, voice
Matteo Lucchesi: percussion

Tracklist with previews:

Sea Song (Robert Wyatt)
La metro eccetera (Lucio Battisti/Pasquale Panella)
Venus in Furs (Lou Reed)
Water (Third Ear Band)
Some Guys (Tuxedomoon)
Molecole (Lavezzi/Mogol)
Choci Loni (The Young Marble Giants)
Sysyphus Part 1 (Rick Wright)
Sysyphus Part 2
Sysyphus Parts 3
Sysyphus Parts 4
Il re del mondo (Franco Battiato/Giusto Pio)
Mistero (Lucio Battisti/Velezia)
Nostalgia (David Sylvian)
Memory of a Free Festival (David Bowie)

PRESS:

Press Office: L’ottimo ufficio-stampa di Cinzia La Fauci

ARTISTS AND BANDS – Gianluca Renoffio
The SMS Orchestra is a didactic chamber orchestra project founded in 2012 by artistic director Stefano Giannotti.
It is a “mobile and variable” vocal-instrumental ensemble consisting of twelve to sixteen members, all students of the Sinfonia Music School in Lucca. The project was created primarily to help participants overcome their own limitations—not only technical ones—by exploring and experimenting with new musical territories beyond their comfort zone, blending music, theater, and performance.
The result is a multi- and inter-genre repertoire that merges classical music and progressive rock, psychedelia and post-punk, contemporary music and Baroque music. (…)
Read more on: https://www.artistsandbands.org/ver2/recensioni/recensioni-album/11865-orchestrasms-musicasparpagliata

Gianluca Renoffio, February 10th, 2025

NEW UNDERGROUND MUSIC – Carry Munter
(…) Musica Sparpagliata by Orchestra SMS contains 15 first-rate songs, featuring influences from pop, folk, Rock in Opposition, and melodic music. I therefore recommend that any fan of one or more of these genres give this special album a listen.
Read more at: https://carrysnewundergroundmusic.blogspot.com/2025/02/review-orchestra-sms-musica.html

Carry Munter, February 23rd, 2025

NON SOLO PROGROCK – Massimo Salari
(…) Very rich is the booklet accompanying the album by Tommaso Tregnaghi, with insights, feelings of the protagonists, descriptions, lyrics, photos and much more. This, too, is respect for those who love and buy music. Giannotti’s SMS Orchestra is an added value for the musical culture of both young and old, that is, those who lived those years. A generational relay that bodes well for a future that is always alive and attentive to evolution, with awareness and respect for the past.
Read more at: https://nonsoloprogrock.blogspot.com/2025/02/orchestra-sms.html

Massimo Salari, February 26th, 2025

TOSCANA OGGI – Nicola Giuntini

In today’s liquid-modern musical landscape, characterized by rapid listening and a binge of click & scroll, there’s a refreshing change that stands apart and offers a critique of what we might listen to if we let ourselves be carried away by social media. The good news comes from Lucca, born ten years ago thanks to the Scuola di Musica Sinfonia and the foresight of Maestro Stefano Giannotti.

But the real moment arrived on Friday, February 14th, the day the album Musica Sparpagliata was released with AltRock by MaRaCash Records, by the Orchestra SMS. An orchestra that was once educational and now stands proudly without qualifiers. What should we expect from sixteen young people emerging from adolescence or already free from that generational burden? To answer this, one must be unconventional, and so we take the album, open the booklet filled with photos and captions, insert the compact disc into the Hi-Fi system – a gesture now subversive and bold – only to have our expectations shattered.

But how can we bring together Battiato, the more cryptic Battisti, Bowie, Richard Wright, Robert Wyatt, and David Sylvian? How can we intertwine The Velvet Underground, Third Ear Band, Tuxedomoon, and Young Marvel Giants? Eva Bartolucci, Domenico Piegaia, Tommaso Barattini, Riccardo Santabarbara, Giada Del Grande, Elisa Cheng, Jacopo Di Grazia, Gabriele Stefani, Niccolò Paganucci, Franco Cheng, Enrico Giuntini, Francesca Pezzuti, Sofia Paterni, Duccio Nieri, Edgar Gomez, and Matteo Lucchesi teach us this.

In Musica Sparpagliata, there is elegance, stylistic refinement, micrometric precision, intimacy, and unpredictability. There is a surprising cohesion, the kind of bond-“binding” that persists through all the tracks, even in the pauses. The golden thread with which it is woven is that of Stefano Giannotti, the same one that made the OTEME ensemble vibrate. In the SMS orchestra and the album, the young musicians know each other well and have been together for ten years; some even go fishing together. Listening to the work, one goes beyond the known paradigms, and the edges of the frame of this multifaceted musical picture, with its pervasive listening, are represented by the artists, once students and now musicians, shaped by the limae labor of the director. What strikes is that the tracks, though complex, once manifestos of an era and a musical movement, now shine like pearls found in a muddy seabed, glowing anew to the point of being truly original once again.

But what’s in this work, which took two years to build, with lessons, rehearsals, recording, and mixing? Experimentation, chamber music, ambient music, contemporary music, progressive rock, and singer-songwriter music. The tracks, initially conceived as isolated islands, distant from each other in time and place, now form a single archipelago, flying the sole flag of the SMS Orchestra. The orchestra and Giannotti make them play with their own language and stylistic traits, reinterpreting them with respect, trying to reshape the precious raw material for the only mission that an artist has: to create art and stir the mind in difficult times.

Thus, Musica Sparpagliata, the epitome of the SMS instrumental-vocal ensemble, finds its rightful destination after the long musical journey. And if in today’s desolate musical landscape, views and followers seem to prevail long before skill, know-how, and high artistic density ideas, the subjects now called to judgment feel like a comforting affront and a challenge, anything but vintage.

SMS is not nostalgia, nor an anachronism, but a thrust and solidity, because it is based on study, practice, slow listening, passion, genius, and music truly played and played together.

Nicola Giuntini, February 23rd, 2025

ATHOS ENRILE – Musica… musica… musica… ma non solo

(…) It’s the culmination of ten years of work, but… the artistic result?
Surprising!
The analysis of the titles and the authors, when thinking about the original creations, offers a mix of experimentation, pop, and singer-songwriter music, proving that genre labeling is perhaps convenient, but not necessary when the focus is on presenting quality music. This is a very broad and subjective concept, but one that is not separate from the idea of dedication and attention to detail. (…)

Athos Enrile, March 4th, 2025

VER SCACRUM – Cesare Buttaboni

(…) the true protagonist of Musica Sparpagliata is silence. A silence that insinuates itself between the notes, leaving room for breath, amplifying every vibration and every pause. A silence that is not absence, but a subtle presence, like an echo of something that exists in a dimension just beyond our own. Stefano Giannotti and his orchestra don’t just play: they evoke, suggest, and create atmospheres.
Read more (in Italian) at:
https://www.versacrum.com/vs/2025/03/orchestra-sms-musica-sparpagliata.html

Cesare Buttaboni, March 4th, 2025

IndiePerCui – Marco Zordan

A crossroads, a blend, a desire to go beyond the already-heard, to recreate, in the surrounding ether, a musical vision that stains the walls of contemporaneity, drawing from the past to reconstruct a personal idea of sound capable of jealously guarding the most intimate parts of a being enclosed in the sensations of everyday life. Orchestra SMS is a project led by the composer from Lucca, Stefano Giannotti, which finds, among the students of the Scuola di Musica Sinfonia in Lucca, the necessary expressive force to establish a unique relationship with the listener. A bond that, in the simplicity of being together, rediscovers sound pearls of indisputable value. From Battisti to Battiato, through The Velvet Underground and Robert Wyatt, this is truly a rare collective project that welcomes beauty, enchanting with a solid background presence that makes the musicians themselves the protagonists of a daydream. An ensemble that goes beyond mediocrity to achieve a result that becomes exhilarating, sincere, and close to that idea of art that transcends the ordinary.

Orchestra SMS – Musica sparpagliata (Altrock Records)

Marco Zordan, March 5th, 2025

MUSICALNEWS – Patty Bertolino / Giancarlo Passarella

The work done by this student chamber ensemble, blending art-rock and contemporary music, is fascinating, set in a disenchanted garden: no covers, but remakes… or rather, I could almost say rewritings, in the most learned sense of the term, which is very prominent in literature…

Patty Bertolino/Giancarlo Passarella, March 5th, 2025

DISTORSIONI – Ignazio Gulotta

The wonderful title chosen, Musica Sparpagliata, would be enough to inspire one to listen to and purchase this delightful album, as it perfectly conveys the approach to music of this original ensemble, directed by Stefano Giannotti, a musician, video artist, teacher, and author of radio works and various albums both under his own name and with the band Oteme. This work by the SMS Orchestra stems from his teaching activity, which has been ongoing for more than ten years, and involves sixteen young musicians under Giannotti’s guidance. He conducted, arranged, and contributed with guitar, percussion, and harpsichord to the album’s creation.(…)

Read more (in Italian) at: https://www.distorsioni.net/canali/dischi/musica-sparpagliata

Ignazio Gulotta, March 6th, 2025

PARCO PARANOICO

An interesting and captivating journey through great songwriters and some of their lesser-known, more intimate, and more reflective songs. Songs that have sometimes been forgotten or sidelined, partly due to the frantic, compulsive, and insatiable bulimia of modern times — with their uncontrollable, obsessive, maniacal, and relentless pursuit of the next media sensation to exploit and monetize.

Mik Brigante Sanseverino, March 7th, 2025

THE SLEEPING SHAMAN

The first time I encountered the intriguing fusion of rock music and orchestral arrangements was back in 1970, while tuned into a radio program dedicated to the rock genre. A Philadelphia-based ensemble known as The Assembled Multitude, comprised solely of session musicians and masterminded by the late producer Tom Sellers, caught my ear with their rendition of The Beatles I Want You (She’s So Heavy). While undeniably catchy, the lush strings and soaring brass couldn’t quite capture the raw energy and grit that I craved from a proper rock cover performed by a true rock outfit.

Mimmo Caccamo, March 10th, 2025