Listening to Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Sei Capricci” for solo violin might best be compared to spending 20 minutes in a butterfly garden. The music rustles, flickers, alights for the briefest moment somewhere, and then flies on. A similar texture lends his classic opera “Luci mie traditrici” (1998) a dreamlike quality. When, in one brief intermezzo of the hour-long drama, he introduces five minutes of regular pulse, it feels like a gigantic tectonic plate has shifted, so sensitive have our ears become. Sciarrino’s new opera, “Ti vedo, ti sento, mi perdo,” was recently premiered at La Scala in Milan. On July 7, it will come to the Staatsoper in Berlin, in a staging by Jürgen Flimm and under the baton of Maxime Pascal. We met over late-afternoon coffees at a conference room there. When Sciarrino received a call on his smartphone, he lamented ever buying one. “I don’t want to give my memory to another instrument,” he said.
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