Classical Music

Classical Music

Gabriele Manca studied piano under Bruno Canino and composition under Giacomo Manzoni at the Conservatory in Milan. He won the prize "Musica nel nostro tempoCasa RICORDI", the prize "Neue Generation in Europa", WDR (Koln), Biennale Musica (Venice), Festival d'Automne (Paris) for the European Year of Music. In 2000 he obtained the Japan Foundation Uchida Fellowship, thanks to which he was able to work on the music for Noh Theatre at the Toho Gakuen University. His music has been played during the most important concert series and festivals of new music. He has held numerous workshops, masterclasses and conferences at the Irino Foundation, the Senzoku University Tokyo, the Toho Gakuen University, the Tokyo College of Music, the University of Melbourne and the Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Santiago, Chile, where from 2006 to 2013 he was visiting professor; since 2015 he has held several masterclasses at the CENART in Mexico City. He teaches composition at the Conservatory in Milan. Il dodicesimo studio was written in memory of Antonio Sardi de Letto, who, in 2008, had recorded the first eleven piano studies on the CD Studi per il XXI secolo ("Studies for the 21st Century"). Senti! Aspetta! Was composed in two stages: the first part was completed, for solo piano, between 2018 and 2019, to which the instrumental 'coda' was added in 2020, a sort of enormous 'reverberation' of what had been heard before. Offese fantastiche is a series of seven very short pieces for solo piano that each explore an elementary musical idea that is presented radically in it's bare nakedness.

Between the new and the familiar, the accordion is a young instrument. This is precisely why I believe it lends itself almost naturally, or rather vocationally, to experimentation. At the same time, its place in the collective imagination, its wide diffusion in popular and folkloric cultures, also make it a “familiar”, “domestic” instrument. This combination of “familiarity” and experimentation is, then, the inspiration behind the entire “Fly. Electronic Music for Accordion” project. New works for accordion and electronics aimed precisely at enhancing such duplicity: the feeling of familiarity and the disconcerting activation of the new. For this purpose, I involved some of the Italian composers among those I most respect, with whom I could establish a creative relationship that could lead to the development of particularly significant works featuring this instrument. At least in my ambitions and intentions. What the outcome will be is not for me to say. The fact remains that when a new work is born, especially one with some compositional weight, we are always faced with an event, the opening up of a world, which, however bewildering, or perhaps precisely because of this, proves capable of putting us in relation with ourselves and with the contemporaneity in which we live. Besides this, the choice of alternating the electroacoustic works with “small” pieces (in terms of duration) taken from the historical, classical literature to which we belong, is also intended to promote precisely the coexistence between familiarity and experimentation. A piece of “easy” listening, “familiar”, a prelude or postlude, as it were, in order to “cleanse” the ear, in some way to prepare it for a different kind of listening, that of electroacoustic music, which is complex and full of novel information, not “familiar”. Fragments of history, therefore, that intervene in the rhythm of listening, supposing a linear path, almost like recollections that assail the involuntary memory, to try to undergo an experience that allows us to achieve a relationship between reminiscence and the new.
Germano Scurti

Classical Music

Without hesitation, in these six pieces Zeno Baldi takes us into the realm of listening and attention, not imposing them on us as dogmas or as narrated and fossilized history, but inviting us to consider the infinitely small, the precarious, the unstable, the fragmented, the recomposed as "places" to live in, to occupy with the body, more than to understand. The music of Zeno Baldi tells us nothing, but faces us with our being, our being precisely there, in the phenomenon that it achieves and completes in our ears; it enables us to live the most insignificant complexities of the material at the moment when it becomes another, transmuted into "clean" and definite objects, into primary pulsations, into apparently familiar figures, into new surfaces. Zeno Baldi (b. 1988, Verona) is an Italian composer, who graduated from the Kunstuniversit�t Graz and the Conservatory in Milan. He writes for acoustic instruments and various kinds of electronic devices, and is also active as a performer and sound designer for mixed media. His music has been presented at festivals such as MATA (New York), Rond� (Milan), London Ear Festival, Firenzesuonacontemporanea, Smog (Bruxelles), and performed by instrumental groups including Ensemble Linea, Ensemble Zeitfluss, Divertimento Ensemble (composer in residence 2017), Orchestra del Teatro la Fenice, OPV Orchestra, and soloists such as Heather Roche, Marco Fusi, Manu Mayr.

The process, we could call an alchemical metamorphosis, of the transformation of human breath into sound and then into music, is what has made the trumpet one of the most fascinating and most emotional instruments since ancient times. It is no coincidence that the idea of the trumpet as an object generating signals (although the meaning goes well beyond the practical function), as an instrument intended to announce events of particular importance, has always been present in Western culture. Countless iconographies bear witness to this fact. The great composers of the past did not resist the charm of the instrument, and even the production of the Twentieth Century is vast and kaleidoscopic. After this premise, the concept of dialogue must be clarified. This release is in fact structured intertwining different dialogues that take place simultaneously between different subjects, dialogues that reveal themselves immediately and dialogues that remain hidden and must be sought more in depth: dialogues that intersect and intertwine with each other.

Margherita Berlanda is an incredible sound artist who not only knows her accordion inside out technically, but also seems to regularly look into it's soul. Margherita elicits spherical yet grounded tones from her instrument; she explores the unknown and loves to think outside the box. It is no coincidence that Margherita calls her new project "Beyond/Oltre". She has brought together pieces of music that challenge her as an interpreter to overcome the most diverse boundaries: tonal, physical, ideological boundaries. In doing so, the young musician turns the accordion into an instrument of discovery and revelation. With artistic vision, she takes us on a journey in which the musical landscape is in a constant state of flux.

One of the most significant Serbian composers of the final decade of the 20th century, Vlastimir Trajkovic (1947-2017), came from a prominent musical family. Among it's members were Miloje Milojevic, the composer's grandfather and a pioneer of the Serbian Modernist movement in music, as well as his mother, Gordana Milojevic - Trajkovic, a pianist and composer. He completed his composition studies in the class of Vasilije Mokranjac at the Music Academy in Belgrade in 1971 and obtained his MA degree in 1977. He further refined his skills by studying abroad, with Witold Lutoslawski in Groznjan and with Olivier Messiaen in Paris. In addition to his career as a composer, Trajkovic also worked as a music writer, critic, and editor. Over nearly four decades, from 1975 to 2012, Trajkovic worked as a professor of composition at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, where he also served as the head of the Composition Department for several years. In addition to a series of accolades he received for his outstanding work, Trajkovic became a member of the Serbian Academy of Science and Art in 2000. At the outset of his creative journey, Trajkovic, a polyglot with extensive erudition, distinguished himself as a composer who embraced an intellectual and critical approach to music and it's heritage. His distinctive style is firmly rooted in the amalgamation of impulses and influences he gleaned from a wide array of musical epochs. Trajkovic's opus, imbued with a postmodern sensibility, reflects both his receptivity to various stylis-tic idioms and his unwavering commitment to flexible, contemporary compositional solutions. Exhibiting a penchant for the sublime fusion of divergent musical elements, Trajkovic traversed through diverse genres, establishing creative dialogues with the legacy of baroque, avantgarde, minimalism, neoclassicism, jazz, and, most notably, impressionism. The sonic universe of impressionism reverberates throughout Trajkovic's entire body of work. His exploration of the musical legacy of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel in terms of references and outcomes led to a creative evolution in Trajkovic's compositions, resulting in exquisitely refined and cultivated aesthetic expressions that align stylistically with neo-impressionism.

Sylvius Leopold Weiss was born in the then Bohemian province of Silesia (now in Poland) in 1687 and grew up under the strong influence of Losy, which can be seen clearly in his early compositions. After his Italian sojourn (1710-14), Weiss became deeply involved with the Prague musical milieu and, according to numerous documents, he must have spent much time there even after he was invited by Augustus the Strong, on the 23rd of August 1718, to become an "Electoral Saxon and Royal Polish Chamber Musician" at his court in Dresden. In the years between 1717 and 1724 he worked closely with Johann Christian Anthoni von Adlersfeld at the Prague Music Academy to create one of most extensive collections of his music ever assembled, what we now know as the "London Manuscript." Also, in this period he worked with the Prague lute maker Thomas Edlinger to improve upon the 11-course instrument normally used by adding two bass courses to extend its range. Two different solutions were possible: using thicker or slightly longer strings. The thicker strings didn’t sound very good, so the extra length was decided upon. The added bass courses were placed on a newfangled contraption attached to the side of the pegbox, called a "bass-rider." This is the kind of lute I play for this recording. By the way, lutes were strung in gut and not in metal, as they often are today, and I have continued this tradition for the present recording. The Dresden manuscript includes many of Weiss’s best-known works that are found in other manuscripts as well, but it also contains a number of expansive sonatas composed late in life that are unique to this source. A few of them are in Weiss’s own hand, but the rest were probably copied by the Saxon minister for war, Friedrich Wilhelm Raschke, who, according to Crawford, "seems to have gained access to what must have been Weiss’s personal archive of music."

The Singer & Fischer duo always causes great impact on the audience, adding to their playing a high virtuosity, perfect blend with a wide repertoire from baroque to current music. In the world premiere of my piece Dialogues of the Island and the Sea, recently on January 10 of this year, the entire public noticed a level of perfection so high that applause became a clamorous storm. This program made a great impression on me. Thank you for motivating me to write for your excellent duo. (Leo Brouwer Z�rich, January 2019) While they were students, Sebastien Singer and Andre Fischer formed a cello and guitar duo. Fascinated by chamber music, they decided to dedicate themselves to original repertoire for their unusual instrumental combination. They released their first album in 2015, which was warmly welcomed by music lovers and international press.

Listening to the new album by the Coritage Saxophone Quartet means immersing yourself, for a little over an hour, in an atmosphere of suspended contemporaneity, built on a complex web of historical, formal and auditory links. Boundaries consist of a diverse yet harmonious selection of musical pieces, either created or especially arranged for saxophone quartet, that range from the Fifties to the present day. These not only mix contexts and heterogeneous compositional styles, but also evoke atmospheres and sound profiles reminiscent of a wide variety of genres, from jazz to film music, and from so-called cultured music to that of ethnical origin.

‘Illumination’ comprises examples of rare musical and cultural gems which were nearly lost after the Holocaust ravaged Italian-Jewish religious and cultural life. Many of the traditional Italian- Jewish ‘piyyutim’ (Hebrew spiritual/liturgical songs and poems) performed here remain widely unknown in concert halls and to the general public. The Jewish and Christian Italian cultures of the Renaissance and Baroque period were at once separate and also intricately connected, and synagogue music itself has always adapted and reflected contemporary- ostensibly unrelated melodies and styles. It was thus a natural step to present works from the early spiritual music of Jewish Italy (all whose texts were in use as early as from 1600 and even before) seen through the prism of the prevalent musical styles of the same period in which Salamone Rossi and Benedetto Marcello’s own important synagogue-based works were created: the Renaissance and Baroque periods. As specialists in early Italian music, this involved interpreting which contemporary styles of music predominant outside of the ghetto in Italy at the time were likely reflected in the Jewish works (which would themselves have been performed- during synagogue services- vocally only). The task of reviving these pieces and presenting them in the fuller context of the Italian culture that they inhabited was fascinating, as the works revealed themselves in their unique beauty and spirit.

Classical Music

Classical Music