The Great Academies, the Masters and the Students

A series of concerts curated by Antonio Caggiano

 

MarCH – JUNE 2025

The Great Academies, the Masters and the Students is a series of four concerts, scheduled from March to June 2025, which aims to celebrate the exceptional link between musical tradition and emerging talent. Each concert of the season sees the alternation of established masters and their promising students, all from the most prestigious European music academies. The series offers the opportunity to listen to performances that mix the past and the present, the consolidated mastery and the energy of young musicians, for a rich and engaging musical experience.

At the Edge of the Night: Fragments of Light and Shadow
The first concert of of the series features the young musicians of Trio Concept, a group of three extraordinary talents, currently studying at the Hochschule in Basel. The ensemble will explore a territory in which “sound seems to dissolve at the edges of perception, like an echo that gets lost in the night”, as they themselves affirm. Their musical offering “goes beyond the simple question of dynamics or instrumental writing”; it is a profound reflection on the fragility of music, on its elusive nature and on the alternation between light and darkness. The programme includes pieces by authors such as Lili Boulanger – who died when she was just twenty four years old, sister of the very famous composition teacher Nadia - Kaija Saariaho, Maurice Ravel, Salvatore Sciarrino and Wolfgang Rihm. Each piece tells a story of distance, transformation and mystery, giving the audience an experience suspended between the tangible and the intangible.

Virtuosity and Passion: The Double Bass between Past and Present
In the second concert of the series, Maestro Giuseppe Ettorre, double bass teacher at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena and first double bass at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, will be joined by his brillant student, Fabrizio Buzzi, currently first double bass at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, and by the pianist, Pierluigi Di Tella. This concert, in which virtuosity is the protagonist, will guide the audience on a journey through the world of the double bass, with a programme ranging from historical to contemporary compositions. It will start with Giovanni Bottesini, move onto Franz Schubert and Gustav Mahler, up to the present day with a piece by Nicola Sani dedicated to Ettorre, which had its world premiere at La Scala in 2024. A concert that, thanks to the meeting between masters and students, will offer the audience not only a virtuosity of the highest level, but also a reflection on the transmission of musical tradition through the generations. An event aimed at lovers of chamber music and those who want to discover the double bass in a new, original light.

Repetition and Rhythm
The third concert of the series features the Chigiana Percussion Ensemble, a group in residence at the Accademia Chigiana. Made up of the best students of the summer advanced training courses, the ensemble boasts a notable concert career. In addition to participating in all the years of the Chigiana Summer Festival, its prestigious curriculum includes performances at the Ravello Festival, the Ravenna Festival and the MAXXI Museum in Rome. The programme will focus mainly, but not only, on minimalist music. Spectators will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the radical minimalism of the masters, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, protagonists of a musical revolution with their repetitive and hypnotic structures. The concert will continue with works by some of the main disciples of this movement, such as the American Julia Wolpe and the Italian Giovanni Sollima, who have pushed minimalism in new expressive directions. The piece by Freedman / Samuels, characterised by obvious jazz influences, will introduce an improvisational and rhythmic dimension to the performance. The energy and the expressive power of this group will make the musical experience a journey of high emotional tension.

Music from Exile
The season concludes with a concert by the clarinetist José Luis Estelles – teacher at the Hochschule for Music and Dance Köln, Conservatorio superior de Musica San Sebastian – together with the pianist Amedeo Salvato.

Music from Exile explores the musical production of composers who fled, were imprisoned or were persecuted by those in power for racial, artistic and political reasons. The concert opens with the Kaddish by Maurice Ravel, one of the oldest Jewish prayers, linked to the idea of loss, and continues with the Sonata by Moisej Vajnberg, a Polish composer who, to escape the Nazis, fled to the Soviet Union where, despite his friendship with Dmitrij Shostakovich, he was placed on the blacklist of artists accused of “formalism” and arrested in 1953. From captivity in Stalag VIII-A, where Olivier Messiaen composed Quatuor pour la fin du temps in 1940, we move on to the rhythmic and sonorous rainbows of György Ligeti, whose artistic production is decisively marked by his escape to Vienna in the aftermath of the 1956 Budapest uprising. In the same year that Messiaen composed his Quatuor, the Spaniard Julián Bautista fled from the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and took refuge in Argentina where he wrote the Fantasia Española of our programme. The concert ends with a mix of Latin jazz and classical music by Paquito D’Rivera, a Cuban clarinetist and composer, who has been a political refugee in the USA since 1980.

The season, The Great Academies, the Masters and the Students thus offers an extraordinary overview of the new generations of musicians who, under the guidance of great masters, are contributing to the history of music of our time. An opportunity to appreciate the talent, the passion and the innovation that animates the classrooms of the most prestigious music academies in Europe.

Antonio Caggiano
Artistic Director for musical activity at Dello Scompiglio

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7 JUNE 2025
AT 7.30 pm

José Luis Estelles | Amedeo Salvato

Music from Exile

music by Bautista, d’Rivera, Ligeti, Messiaen, Ravel, Weinberg

Maurice Ravel
Kaddisch for clarinet and piano

Mieczyslaw Weinberg
Sonata op.28 for clarinet and piano
Allegro, Allegretto, Adagio

Olivier Messiaen
from Quatuor pour la fin du temps, Abime des oiseaux for solo clarinet

György Ligeti
from Etudes pour piano, Arc-en-ciel, Fanfares

Julian Bautista
Fantasia Española for clarinet and piano

Paquito d’Rivera
The Cape Cod Files
Benny, Bandoneón, Lecuonerias, Chiquita Blues for clarinet and piano

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José Luis Estelles  clarinet
Amedeo Salvato  piano

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Music, beyond sound, is testimony. This programme brings together works born from disorientation, uprooting and, often, pain. Whether it was political or religious persecution, or the weight of war and history, the composers presented here have seen their lives marked by the need to flee, adapt or rebuild far from home. However, even in such circumstances, music flourishes. It is in this tension between nostalgia and freedom that the pieces of the programme are placed, united not only by the brilliance of the writing, but also by the common echo of a lost or dreamed homeland.

The Spanish clarinettist José Luis Estellés, one of the great European performers of his generation, and the pianist Amedeo Salvato, a musician of refined sensitivity and deep artistic complexity, have regularly shared the stage for over two decades, exploring every kind of repertoire. On this occasion, they present an authentic sonic journey, with the commitment and empathy required by the confrontation with a music marked by memory and resilience.

Inspired by the Jewish liturgical chant of mourning, Kaddisch (1914) is an arrangement of one of the Deux mélodies hébraïques by Ravel, a Franco-Basque composer whose 150^th birthday is celebrated this year. Although he never lived in true exile, Ravel always felt an emotional distance from the extreme nationalism of his time, a distance that can also be appreciated in his music, which is always in dialogue with marginal cultures.

This piece, imbued with solemnity and reflection, assumes a particular significance in a programme dedicated to the memory of what has been lost, introducing, as an overture, the Sonata op. 28 for clarinet and piano by Mieczysław Weinberg.

Weinberg (Warsaw, 1919), a Polish Jew, fled Nazism and settled in the Soviet Union, where he was welcomed, but also surveilled and repressed. The tragedies of the war, of the Jews and of his own life (exile, the killing of his parents and sister by the Nazis and his father-in-law by the Stalinist regime) are reflected in many of his works. His Sonata op. 28 (1945), written at the age of 26, has a unique voice; melancholic, lyrical, restrained. Beneath the apparent serenity, one senses the shadow of war and the desire for identity affirmation in a hostile environment. This music is, in its own way, an act of resistance, which expresses a very peculiar intensity and is enriched with a klezmer flavour that recalls the Jewish theatre where his father worked. To convey the euphoria and pain contained in this piece, the interpretation requires a very wide dynamic spectrum, the willingness to explore the tonal inflections of the klezmer style and an evocative and ambiguous tranquillity in the final movement.

Olivier Messiaen wrote L’Abîme des oiseaux during the capture of French troops in a rapid advance of the German army near Verdun. He was later sent to the Stalag VIII-A prison camp, where he composed the famous Quatuor pour la fin du temps. In Abîme des oiseaux, “the abyss” represents sadness, the finitude of the human condition, while the “birds” symbolise freedom and spirit, recurring elements throughout Messiaen's work (a passionate ornithologist who transcribed birdsong in his music). In a work inspired by the Apocalypse according to St John, the Abîme transcends the musical to become an experience, a reflection on philosophical time and faith.

The programme dedicates space to the solo piano with György Ligeti's Études pour piano: Arc-en-ciel and Fanfares. Ligeti, a Hungerian, fled the communist regime in 1956 after the brutal repression of the Budapest revolution. His Études reflect this complexity: Arc-en-ciel is a study in timbral and poetic subtleties, while Fanfares is an unbridled rhythmic explosion. Both pulsate with the freedom found in the West, a creative freedom born from the trauma of exile.

Another figure who developed his art in exile was the Madrilenian composer, Julián Bautista, who lived in Argentina with Manuel de Falla. The Fantasía Española op. 17 for clarinet and piano, composed after the Spanish Civil War, combines national roots with a modern and direct language. In it, echoes of an idealised Spain resonate, reinvented from a distance, like a dream full of nostalgia. This work is performed today for the first time in Italy.

The concert ends with The Cape Cod Files by the versatile Cuban musician Paquito d’Rivera. Exiled for political reasons, in these pieces written in 2011, the author embraces musical genres, jazz, classical and popular, in a transversal way. Composed in the United States, the country that welcomed him, these “sheets” of Cape Cod are also fragments of a reconstructed identity. The clarinet sings with brio, but also with the depth of those of have learned to live between two worlds, and pays tribute to Benny Goodman, tango, Ernesto Lecuona and the novel Chiquita by Antonio Orlando Rodríguez.

 

Musiche dall’esilio is therefore a journey from lament to affirmation. A celebration of human creation, even on the margins, when home becomes a memory and music a refuge.

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