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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
November 15, 2015
Italian music has had a rather variable press over the years. One Elijah Fenton, for example, in his "Epistle to Mr. Southerne, from Kent, January 28, 1710-11" declared that:
There was an age, (its memory will last!)
Before Italian Airs debauched our taste.
Presumably the line-ending "last" and "taste" are another example of assonance - or, as Rita would put it, "getting the rhyme wrong".
Hector Berlioz described Italy as "this gloomy, anti-musical country" and Georges Bizet, in an 1858 letter, went so far as to claim that "there are no pianists in Italy and if you can only play the scale of C with both hands you pass for a great artist", although some nine years later he admitted "under my breath...I love Italian music as one loves a courtesan".
But let us instead ponder the words of Marin Mersenne (he of Prime Number fame): "Italians...represent as much as they can the passions and the affections of the soul and of the spirit...with a violence so extraordinary that one would judge that they are touched with the same affections as they represent in their singing".
There is undoubtedly something about Italian music, even at its most determinedly avant-garde (yes, Signori Berio and Nono, I do mean you), which never loses sight of the songful and the emotional.
Sunday's entrancing concert from Aventa, devised and conducted by Giorgio Magnanensi, was a triumph from every point of view.
Magnanensi chose three works by composers "whose influence and inspiration has been supporting my work and activity for many years" - Giacinto Scelsi, Salvatore Sciarrino and Franco Donatoni - and linked them, via three newly-composed "panels" into a continuous whole which was complete with the world premiere of his own TDU XX.
Even before the concert proper began, the sounds produced by the musicians warming up on stage - flutes, bass clarinet, piano, vibraphone, violin, cello and horn - were enticing and promised sonic treats to come.
Giacinto Scelsi's Pranam II opened the concert. The work dates from 1973 - positively medieval by Aventa's standards - yet sounds as fresh as paint. Scelsi was largely ignored during his lifetime (he died in 1988), yet the slow spectral chords of this work, with the occasional shriek from the flutes and tremolando snarks from violin and viola, melded together into a series of completely engrossing textures and revealed a composer of considerable originality and ingenuity.
The music now progressed seamlessly into the first of Magnanensi's three "panels", with fascinating live electronics, as the musicians rearranged themselves (some left the stage) for the next piece. One of the, perhaps unintended, consequences of "wiring up" the performers is that there were occasions when the sounds of the musicians themselves, for example breathing, could be heard. For me, this merely added another fascinating layer of atmospherics to the whole enterprise.
Salvatore Sciarrino's Lo Spazio Inverso, from 1985, proved to be an extremely quiet piece on the whole, largely comprised of single sparse notes, with sporadic outbursts from the celesta (perhaps the least violent instrument imaginable). The performance was highly concentrated and quite riveting.
The second panel led us inexorably into Franco Donatoni's Arpège (1986), the longest piece yet. Opening with piano and vibraphone chords, the remaining instruments - flute, clarinet, violin and cello - join in with skittering passagework before a violin "hoedown" (the best comparison I could come up with) accompanied by vibraphone and cello, leading to a bouncy tutti passage with a good deal of rhythmic interest and impetus.
The final panel led into Magnanensi's own TDU XX, a series of fascinating soundscapes co-ordinated by Magnanensi's expressive gestures: at times he seemed to be bestowing a benediction on the players, at others he seemed to be channelling Maurice Moss from The IT Crowd.
Although this was the longest work on the programme it, like everything I have heard from Magnanensi's pen, held the interest in a vice-like grip until the final, almost overwhelming, crescendo.
This was an evening of extraordinary beauty, exquisitely played.
The ensemble: Müge Büyükçelen, violin; Mieka Michaux, viola; Alasdair Money, cello; Darren Buhr, doublebass; Heather Beaty, Mark McGregor, flutes; AK Coope, clarinets; Darnell Linwood, horn; Tzenka Dianova, keyboards; Corey Rae, percussion; Kirk McNally, audio.
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