Musica da Vedere, Milano, Adi Design Museum, 10.07.2023

The last time I heard a perfect rendition of a contemporary music piece live is something that don’t come to my mind so easily. In fact I have to get back to a violin solo for a Cage work I heard more than ten years ago in a small venue near the Garibaldi Railway Station of Milano held by a couple of then friends of mine. I was really satisfied by the music and in a way disappointed by some members of the audience who told the young performer something as “you gave me pleasure [with the music]”.

The concept of having pleasure from music as it were sex is an idea many listeners of music here in my country shared with me in the past years, even implicitly. I don’t like it, but that’s it: after all, music can also be sensuality – I remember a beautiful bellydancer during an old performance by Ibrahim Maalouf, that I’ll go to see next week, that I really enjoyed, but as far as music I think the best praise you can give a musician is still the old fashioned “you moved me into another dimension”.

After all, music is something you need in order to furnish time – as we furnish space with paintings sometimes – but, far from being a mere embellishment, in the art of music you can find the seeds of every revolution since when you listen to a piece of art you’re outside the capitalistic mechanisms of “do ut des”, as old Romans would have said, and this happens even if you have payed a ticket. In my own country some politicians 20 years ago said “You cannot eat with culture” and this became a mantra then, and now is a reality.

But let’s go to today event, that was held at Adi Desing Museum as it happened last week with the John Cage performance. Actually, I was skeptical for today’s four hours of Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston since all the things you can find in my review of the past weekend concert. But after the start of the performance I had to change my mind quickly and easily. The performance was very similar to some old recordings I found out last sunday after I’ve been told of this gig.

And this is because the musicians, a nice trio composed by Sara Baldini (flutes), Veronique Delcambre (piano and celesta) and Jean-Louis Maton (percussions) plus Frank Gizycki at coreographies and dance, were very conscious of the music they were going to play. Inspired by Philip Guston paintings, in which figures and/or textures emerge slowly from the colors imprinted on the canvas, Feldman’s music slowly reveals itsel to the listener.

Small melodic cells made of few notes, an inner and suggested dialogue between the instruments: Feldman painted the music with nice and gentle gestures, influenced by the most intriguing visual artists of his time as it happened also for the Rothko Chapel composition. These late works, as the one we’re reviewing, have this quality of letting the thoughts flow from your head after a sequence of few notes, and it is in my opinion music for meditation.

Gizycki’s dance was at the beginning a little bit too much descriptive, but after quite some time the music kind of took him over as if it was suggesting to him to become more keen on marking time or playing with the equilibrium, as it happens with Butoh dance for instance. Unluckily the festival is over, but next week I’ll attend an exhibition by Arto Lindsay and another by Ibrahim Maalouf, so I won’t let my readers dry as far as reviews of live music.