French guitarist Thierry Mercier talks about Fantasías para guitarra y orquesta, one of two symphonic works by Luis de Pablo, Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, to be performed by the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto during the 64th International Festival of Contemporary Music.
Let’s find out more about …sofferte onde serene…, one of the three compositions we will hear during the Monographic concert dedicated to Luigi Nono on the thirtieth anniversary of his death. The piece is presented by Francesco Prode, a remarkable pianist who is well known to international audiences.
The year 2020 is a year of illustrious anniversaries, such as the two-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven. The modernity of this titan continues to project its fertile influence to the present day, as will be illustrated by Pasquale Iannone and the young pianists from his school, Leonardo Colafelice and William Greco, in their respective concerts. In their three piano recitals Beethoven’s music will share the programme with three other classics of modernity: Franco Donatoni, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Adapted from the masterpiece written by Antonin Artaud in 1935, and set in Papal Rome at the end of the sixteenth century, I Cenci tells the story of the terrible Count Cenci and his murder, of which his daughter Beatrice was accused and for which she was condemned to death. Giorgio Battistelli wrote the music and libretto for this work in which he completely abandons the singing voice to align closer to Artaud’s aesthetic and theatrical conception. I Cenci thus becomes an epic tale on the edge between melodrama and opera, in which the voices of the actors merge with the sounds of the instrumental ensemble and electronics to immerse the spectator in a true “teatro di musica”.
Francesco La Licata presents Sette Canzoni per Bruno, a tribute dedicated by the FontanaMIX Ensemble and the Collettivo In.Nova Fert to Bruno Maderna for the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth: a concert-documentary in which music and memory come together in a multimedia dimension.
Silver Lion in 2017, Dai Fujikura is the author of the Recorder Concerto which will be performed, together with compositions by Fabio Nieder and Fabio Vacchi, by the Orchestra Haydn di Bolzano e Trento on Wednesday, September 30th, at the Teatro alle Tese. His Recorder Concerto explores the unique resources of the recorder (used in three sizes), of which the string orchestra is an amplification; all things here originate in the mouth of the soloist, who – the author explains – plays music in the desert as the simoom blows, raising clouds of sand all around him.
Composer and conductor Konstantia Gourzi explores the concert that will be proposed by the ensemble oktopus. Among the compositions in the programme we will also listen to her Wunde | Wunder, which is inspired by the painting of Michelangelo, Caravaggio and John William Waterhouse and delineates a dramaturgy composed of fragments.
The Divertimento Ensemble dedicates a concert-tribute to Franco Donatoni on the twentieth anniversary of his death. The programme includes “classics” by Donatoni such as Arpège, Spiri and Hot, along with two new pieces commissioned by La Biennale to Ruggero Laganà and Sandro Gorli, composers who trained with the Master in the 1970s.
The protagonist of this episode is Giovanni Verrando, a composer, researcher and teacher who promotes a new idea of violin-making, new instruments with their own grammar and aesthetic that make it possible to shape and reinvent today’s music. His daxophones, bi-gauge strings violins, filtering flutes are the freaks of Instrumental Freak Show, the concert-show which will be staged by the performers of Ensemble Interface on Friday, October 2nd, at the Teatro alle Tese.
“At the origins of Delocazione, there are visions that have never ceased to obsess me over the years: destruction, smoke, dust. A world of ruin and the reign of ash”. In the podcast’s last episode we discover more about Delocazione, the 2017 piece that Silver Lion Raphaël Cendo will present with the French quartet Tana and the Neue Vocalsolisten on Saturday, October 3rd, at the Teatro alle Tese.