Luigi Bellingardi · Corriere della Sera, Rome · 20 May 2012
At its Santa Cecilia debut the other evening, the Leonis Quartet—Antonini and Richaud, violins; Dervieux, viola; Loger, cello—sparkled. With marked authority it demonstrated both first-rate artistic talent and a tenacious commitment to crossover repertoire and multidisciplinary programming combining concert and spectacle, as already seen at Paris’s Odéon. Even in Ravel’s opening F-major Quartet, the Parisian musicians showed how decisive luminous musical construction, experimental taste and rhythmic incisiveness are to them.
At the recital’s centre was Jacopo Baboni Schilingi’s De la nature du Sacre for quartet and live computer, a world premiere commissioned by Santa Cecilia. Before the performance, the composer, a former pupil of Ivan Fedele and Berio and an IRCAM disciple, explained a score integrating electronic percussive effects into the strings’ performing texture. With Baboni Schilingi himself at the console, the result was a brilliant play of interlocking sounds, a kind of homage to Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring.
The entire second half was devoted to minimalism’s founding father Steve Reich and Different Trains for quartet and tape (1988). Standing apart, the Leonis players participated in a kind of representation of three emotional situations connected with train journeys and American childhood memories. [A short passage is obscured in the archived clipping; fragments mention changing shafts of light, from white to darkness and fiery red.] Reich’s revisiting crowned a truly unusual concert.