Milan is undoubtedly the capital of Italian contemporary art music. The leading publishers—from Ricordi to Sonzogno, Suvini Zerboni to Carisch—are based here and together account for over 90 per cent of the market. The Verdi Conservatoire prides itself on being the first to embrace new languages and on having employed virtually all the most prestigious composition teachers.
Italy’s first phonology studio was based here at RAI. The Musica del nostro tempo series began here, becoming an essential model for comparable seasons now organised almost everywhere. Many scholarly and general-interest journals critically addressing this production were founded here. Finally, La Scala, especially between the 1960s and the first half of the 1980s, gave extraordinary encouragement to new music theatre: more than half of Italian premieres over the past fifty years were first presented in this city.
This explains why no Italian composer has escaped some connection with Milan, whether by settling here, teaching here or occasionally working here. But which active, Milan-born composers bring distinction to Italian music? Whether the list is long or short depends on your viewpoint. There are few compared with other cities, perhaps too many for what this admittedly elite market can absorb.
Historical precedence belongs to Giacomo Manzoni, one of the fathers of Italy’s musical avant-garde: a father culturally, as translator and disseminator of Adorno and Schönberg, as well as stylistically and educationally. A contemporary and fellow citizen of another great figure of new music, Niccolò Castiglioni, who died in 1996, Manzoni celebrated his seventieth birthday in 2002 with several premieres. The latest was in Tokyo, where audiences appreciated the formal rigour and material of Trame d’ombre. Many also consider his Mann-inspired Doktor Faustus the finest opera premiered at La Scala in twenty years.
The next generation, the so-called post-avant-garde, includes composers of varying prominence such as Dario Maggi, Mauro Bonifacio, Giampaolo Testoni, Luca Mosca, Maurizio Pisati, Riccardo Nova and Giorgio Colombo Taccani, whose music often appears at contemporary festivals, beginning with the now decade-old Milano Musica. Marco Tutino is another well-known member of this generation, if only because he controversially initiated so-called neo-Romantic revisionism in the 1980s. Though Tutino’s music has never ridden the crest of the wave, he has an opportunity for redemption: La Scala is preparing his opera Vita.
Among the emerging under-forties, the thirty-one-year-old Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, a refined musician, enjoys recognition, as does, above all, thirty-eight-year-old Michele Tadini, Emilio’s son, widely regarded as an authority on producing and manipulating sound electronically and computationally.
The Milanese composer bringing greatest distinction to Italian music is nevertheless forty-six-year-old Luca Francesconi, whose extensive catalogue circulates worldwide on a scale comparable to giants Berio and Sciarrino. His ease in using material from diverse origins, clearly evident in Buffa opera, a recent success at Teatro Strehler, does not undermine the formal rigour learned from his teachers. He can therefore be considered an innovator within the finest tradition. His language has strong dramatic impact and stylistic originality. The recent successful premiere of his Coleridge-inspired Ballata at La Monnaie, Brussels, staged by the brilliant Achim Freyer, confirmed his standing.
Enrico Girardi
[Neighbouring information boxes about orchestral seasons are not part of this article.]