An avant-garde festival: two intense musical evenings with Lombardi, Castagnoli, Sani and Giannotti among the guests. Paolo Petazzi · L’Unità, 1998.
Berlin. The first concerts of the new-Italian-music festival featured the Emilia-Romagna Symphony Orchestra’s contemporary ensemble under Giorgio Bernasconi, ensuring excellent performances. Promoted by the Italian Cultural Institute with Berlin radio and DAAD, the German institution offering artists grants and hospitality, it also includes evenings devoted to recent Italian DAAD recipients Luca Lombardi, Giulio Castagnoli, Nicola Sani and Massimo Giannotti.
The two opening concerts placed three of them within a broader view, particularly of younger generations. Not an organically conceived representative panorama, but a proposal made with limited resources, hopefully a beginning towards introducing Berlin to Italian music’s new voices still unknown in Germany. There are many: Italy’s paradox is that distinctive composers work in a country among the most closed to new music and poorest in supporting institutions and initiatives, with honourable exceptions such as this orchestra and ensemble.
The only representative of the great masters’ generation, Aldo Clementi, appeared through the admirable counterpoint of brief Etwas for six instruments (1997). Particularly significant beside him were Ivan Fedele and Luca Francesconi, emerging composers in their forties established in France, the Netherlands and Belgium but still unknown in Germany.
Francesconi was presented especially effectively: Da Capo (1985–1986) already reveals his characteristic tension, vitality and ability to involve listeners clearly in a formal and expressive journey. Seeking clarity without banal simplification unites several younger composers, each distinct, and belongs to Fedele’s poetics too. Mixtim (1989–1990) “mixes” opposing principles to delineate attracting and repelling force fields until formal balance crystallises.
Ada Gentile, an earlier generation, contributed delicate Landscape of the Mind (1991). Among younger composers, Stefano Gervasoni’s Animato (1992) stood out for nervous sonic exploration. One also appreciated Giovanni Verrando’s elegant restraint in Accanto alla quiete (1993) and Riccardo Nova’s speed in Carved Out (1988).
Entrusting the only world premiere to the youngest, Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, born in 1971, was courageous and commendable. Il colore del nero—requiem in forma di musica’s pessimistic journey towards silence may become clearer and tighter after his intended revision, but already arouses interest.
Finally DAAD’s recipients: Giulio Castagnoli delicately rethinks a Chinese melody in Fioriture II for solo viola, admirably played by Luciano Cavalli. In A Time for the Evening and In stiller ewiger Klarheit, festival curator Nicola Sani draws on Eliot and Hölderlin for opposite characters, one contemplative, the other more contrasted.