The special Schubertiade proposed by the Guadagnini Quartet with the internationally renowned cellist Enrico Bronzi opens with an “incomplete” string quartet. This famous symphony is not the only work that Schubert left unfinished, abandoning the work in 1820 after completing an Allegro of dazzling expressive tension and the first four bars of the Andante. The Guadagnini Quartet, winner of the prestigious “Piero Farulli Prize, and the famous cellist Bronzi will then move on to the Quintet Schubert completed just two months before his death, considered his finest chamber work. With its complex architecture, it is a sort of harmonic kaleidoscope where the extra cello, doubling the lower range, creates an almost symphonic atmosphere.

The Programme

“I am leery of labels and find myself at a loss as to how to describe the music of the Naghash Ensemble. Folk or Classical? Ethnic or Cosmopolitan? Ancient or Modern? In the end, it is a natural product of someone who was raised listening only to Armenian Music in the home, studying European classical music in his youth, making a living as a jazz improviser but like all of us was constantly surrounded by contemporary rock music”. These are the words of John Hodian, composer, pianist and founder of an ensemble named after the medieval Armenian poet Mkrtich Naghash. While his music is the fruit of the diaspora, the titles based on ancient poems are meditations on man’s relationship with God by a XV-century priest and artist forced into exile for refusing to take down the steeple of the church he had built.

The Programme

In Mirco De Stefani’s composition, twelve male voices give musical garb to verses from Dante’s Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, where the pilgrim’s journey through the afterlife comes to its end and fulfilment. This work was composed in 2018 for the 750^th anniversary of the Cloister of the Abbey of Santa Maria di Follina, and premièred by Ensemble Odhecaton, who will perform it again in Ravenna. The score follows the entire length of the Canto through a variety of compositional procedures: polyphonies, counterpoints, imitations, unisons, mirror and spiral canons, binary and ternary rhythms, cadenzas and resumptions. Vocal forms and structures that deliver Dante’s words in all their extraordinary evocative power.

The Programme

On the one hand are the strings of Ensemble Conductus, classically trained but always ready to open up to contemporary music and the unusual sounds of folk traditions. On the other hand is one of the leading Corsican groups performing traditional polyphony, A Filetta. Founded over forty years ago to contribute to the salvation of the Corsican oral heritage, the ensemble effortlessly crosses its boundaries towards such eclectic experiences like the theatre, dance, and the cinema. The traditional Corsican repertoire is integrated with instrumental parts by composer Marcello Fera, in a dialogue with the voices. In this performance, entirely new pieces by Fera are specifically intended for both ensembles, in a definitely irresistible mix.

The Programme

The year Beethoven died, 1827, was also the year that his last five quartets appeared in print. His enigmatic legacy did not go unnoticed by young Mendelssohn, whose Quartet no. 2 shows Beethoven’s influence in the Lied-like quality of its first movement, and especially in its cyclic form and complex variation principle. These are the very features that make up the impressionistic harmonic and timbric texture of Debussy’s Op.10, and that, in the different atmosphere of the mid-XX-century, resurface in Ligeti’s Metamorphoses—“nocturnal”, intimate, private, and safe from the restrictions by the Budapest regime. So, if what the young virtuosos of the Chaos String Quartet share is a desire to “explore extremes and welcome the unpredictable”, who, better than them, could make life sprout from the seeds of a “future” sown almost two centuries ago?

The Programme

“Josquin, don’t say the heavens are cruel and merciless, that gave you genius so sublime”: this is what Serafino Aquilano wrote to Josquin Desprez, his fellow musician at the Sforza court. And indeed, the genius of the Burgundian composer, the greatest innovator of sacred polyphony, is still greatly admired. His fame especially grew after the development of music printing in Italy, where he spent much of his career: in 1484 he was in Milan, then at the Pope’s court until 1499, and finally, after a short period in France, in the service of Duke Ercole I d’Este in Ferrara. The Missa Ave Maris Stella, based on the homonymous Gregorian hymn, probably dates back to his Roman period, and paves the way for the ecstatic contemplation of the divine that culminated in the motet Mirabilia testimonia(Psalm 118).

The Programme

Sapphires, emeralds, garnets, pearls, amethysts, rubies and agates, topazes: these beautiful gems were looted in the East during the Fourth Crusade (1204) and brought back to Venice, where they are now set in the famous Pala d’oro in Saint Mark’s basilica. The altarpiece, first commissioned in the X century by the Doge of the Serenissima from the best goldsmiths in Constantinople, was only completed four centuries later. Inspired by it, Marco Gemmani selected polyphonic music of the Venetian school to “match” with its enamels plaques depicting scenes from the Old Testament and the lives of Christ and St Mark. Pictures of these enamel plaques will be projected during the performance to match the polyphonic architectures in unrivalled splendour.

The Programme

Since the last century, our auditory memory of XIX-century symphonies has become consolidated on the performative tradition of large orchestras using standardized instruments, features and timbres. This is a “habit” that Accademia Bizantina has always avoided, not only for the Baroque repertoire: see for example the two Romantic symphonies they propose in historically-informed performance style, on period instruments. Mendelssohn’s Italian will sound “different”—a tribute to Italian cantability incorporating figurations from saltarello, but mindful of Bach’s counterpoint and infused with the Vienna spirit. And the Rhenish will resonate with a surprisingly rich tonal palette, enhancing Schumann’s thematic elaboration and renewal of the great traditional form.

The Programme