SATURDAY 2 DECEMBER 2023
AT 7.30 PM

CONCERT

Michele Marco Rossi

Lamentatio et Verbum

for solo cello

The lamentation, ancestral expression of pain and loss, and the verb, source of creation and rebirth, are the pillars of this concert.  Michele Marco Rossi, cellist of extraordinary talent recently acclaimed at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, will lead the audience on a journey through the universal language of pain, hope and rebirth.

The word, with its functions, its meanings and signifiers, its ambiguities, has always been part of musical creation, following various paths and modalities, but always establishing a deep bond with sound on multiple levels.

The spoken word, in fact, lives on sound, the written word on a gesture, and both create mental associations that bind to our experience and go far beyond the simple level of immediate meaning.

Words are agglomerations of syllables that in turn arise from the union of letters, and the inversion, the misunderstanding of even just one of these units upsets their original meaning, distorts their function; whereas the sound with which the word is articulated directs its intention, masks what underlies it, enhances its character and perspective.

In this way the calligraphic gesture of Hosokawa’s music traces lines and points that are transformed and modified in time, as in a ritual of writing, while the sounds of Aperghis relate as syllables that form words, then phrases, sentences and conversations of a musical and social fabric in continuous ferment.

The musical tradition, which Bach summarises and sublimates, connects the compositional and executive technique to the rules on which the Rhetoric was based, with its breaths and declamations, pauses and articulations, while the instrumental variations and paraphrases of Piatti, from the arias of the opera, express the link between the Italian tradition and the sung word. 

The programme concludes with the Sonata by Ligeti, with its initial Dialogue that conveys in sound the imaginary intertwining of a male and a female voice, and the Lamentatio by Sollima, in which the voice carries with it the burden of an ancient Mediterranean tradition which, through the sound of the word, brought together distant peoples and cultures and made them, only apparently, similar.

(Michele Marco Rossi)

The concert is the final event of the musical programme, under the direction of Antonio Caggiano, centred on the themes of silence, death and rebirth, through the common thread of improvisation.