Santo Muscas, music critic, La Nuova Sardegna, Ansa.

The Master Mariano Garau is highly regarded and appreciated for his skills as a trainer of choral ensembles, arranger and composer.

His musical output is not remarkable in quantity, it is, however, remarkable in quality.

Just mention 'La ninna di lu puppu bellu' and, above all, 'Gloria', a very inspired page he composed in 1978 for the death of Pope Paul VI.

On every page, Garau profoundly enjoys the taste of a cultured syntax of a vigilant and precise form that always bears the imprint of a shrewd and careful elaboration, without ever forcing its nature.

His compositions for choir reveal in their rhythm and multifaceted nuances his spiritual sphere with an impetus and tender melancholy that stems from a reflective soul, from an affectionate interest in life, in an ideal of order, of faith, of goodness, of beauty.

That yearning for the infinite in him, that need for expansion, love and harmony give him moments when he savours ecstatic joy.

And precisely in the 'Gloria', Maestro Garau transfuses into pure harmonies all the abundance of life in which his soul is rich, certainly unsettling the spirit of the listener because of the subject matter and, at the same time, consoling him because of the sweetness he knows how to instil.

Santo Muscas

Music critic for 'La Nuova Sardegna' and 'Ansa'.

(Cagliari, 20 May 1984)