So many months have passed since I attended some interesting concerts (you can find my reviews on this blog) and since MITO, a review spanning through Turin and Milan this year is dedicated only to classical music, I was about to ask myself if it would be not interesting to open my writings to other types of music, as the montly magazine The Wire did many years ago.
Luckily enough, this wednesdey I was into a cinema to enjoy a horror movie, and there I found out a flyer of this new review of classical contemporary music called Milano Suona Contemporanea. There are many appointments, with music played by the New MADE Ensemble (Cage, Feldman, Scelsi, Bussotti, amongst the others) and less known composers of the contemporaneity, plus a spectacular exhibition by Terry Riley.
This afternoon I attended to the third panel/concert, the one dedicated to Sylvano Bussotti, in this space near the Railway Station of Lambrate, a borough of Milan described online as multiethnical, proactive, full of young people and so on. Actually, I smelled a bad scent all along the road from the Station to the site of Spazio Lambrate where the concert happened, all the activities were closed in all the streets and there were only a bunch of young guys waiting to enter into one youth hostel.
Suburbs they call them. And they’re right. In a way so, it’s interesting that people can come across from other parts of the cities to attend to a concert of contemporary music in this ghostly environment, but I advice you: I’m leaving behind me the ideal of music as a can full of colours ready to enlighten everything around it. This doesn’t mean I’m becoming an adult. I’m only becoming more angry.
On one hand, effectively, one wonders why people devoted to such a niche genre like contemporary music need to be tossed around the four angles of a modern metropolis in order to satiate their hunger for good music. But it’s Milan nowadays that works this way, and I’m quite happy not to live in a town where you count only if you can move a huge amount of money. That said, let’s move on to music.
Sylvano Bussotti (1931-2021) is one of the major composers, painters, poets, novelists, theatre directors of Italian culture during the XX and XXI Century. He starts as a young guy to play violin, then he switches to composition and studies at the Florence Conservatory. In 1956, after a period in which he is self-taught on composing, he becomes pupil of Max Deutsch in Paris, where he starts to frequent Pierre Boulez, who invites him to attend to the famous Darmstadt courses.
The four pieces introduced by Luigi Esposito (visual artist, performer, writer and musical critic who wrote an interesting book about Bussotti in 2013) with the help of electronic slides (photos, music sheets, etc.), were played by the New MADE Ensemble, an ensemble of musicians in residence of the Centro Musica Contemporanea of Milan born in 2009 and praised for their tours in South America and Japan where they bring pieces of music as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.
This afternoon the Ensemble was a quintet featuring Ilaria Torciani (soprano voice), Mauro Sironi (flutes), Edoardo Lega (clarinet), Luca Maggioni (viola), and Rossella Spinosa (piano). The concert introduction was Un Poema Del Tasso, for voice and piano, where Bussotti put in music some verses by Torquato Tasso, a poet from the XIV Century we Italians have studied at school since its importance.
First executed in 1991 but whose composition began in 1957, the piece is crystalline both as a composition and in tonight execution, giving the right introduction to the musical afternoon. In Memoriam for viola, flute, piano and voice is, differently, a composition dedicated to Cathy Berberian after her departure: we had the opportunity to approach a richer texture, with the flute, the piano and the viola supporting the voice.
La Donna for flute, voice and clarinet, is a piece where the spoken part, or, better said, the part acted by the voice is interspersed with the parts played by the other three instruments: the music sheets are becoming more complex, until the last piece, Solo (from La Passion Selon Sade) for voice, piano, flutes, viola and clarinet where every musician can choose what part of the sheet to play, according to the sound parameters signed on the paper: every execution, this way, is completely different from the others.
Visionary as every contemporary composer, Sylvano Bussotti deserves to be deepened with new articles about his music in the future. For the moment I want only to add that my impression after some hours have passed is to have attended an interesting concert but that the musicians involved were too much worried to reproduce or interpret the scores since their difficulties, I suppose, and need to further develop their musical vision. Nothing that can not be done in the future.
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