"Suonare, Capire la Musica d'Oggi" - concert series

Alessandria | Musical

From 23 April 2026 to 30 September 2026

Dates

30 September 2026

Description

Morton Feldman, György Kurtág, Ada Gentile, and Goffredo Petrassi will be the four featured composers in the five "Vivaldi" events dedicated to the musical languages of the present.

ALESSANDRIA – The third edition of SCAMO – Playing, Understanding Today's Music, the Antonio Vivaldi Conservatory's program conceived and curated by composition professor Sergio Lanza, will be an open workshop on contemporary creativity. The program will begin with a concert on Thursday, April 23, 2026, at the Pittaluga Auditorium on Via Parma 1 at 6:30 PM.

The series, consisting of five free concerts, will be made possible thanks to the contribution of the Cassa di Risparmio di Alessandria Foundation and offers a listening experience that intertwines great twentieth-century masters and internationally renowned voices, with performances primarily entrusted to young students of the "Vivaldi" Conservatory.

Professor Sergio Lanza introduces this new edition as follows:

The 2026 "Suonare, Understanding Today's Music" concert series consists of five events: four between April and June and one in September. The four concerts are conceived as a varied and enriching refrain: four composers will be featured consistently—Morton Feldman, György Kurtág, Ada Gentile, and Goffredo Petrassi—who will be joined, from time to time, by pieces by other composers, such as Fontanelli, Herrero, and Stockhausen. The great geographical, cultural, and poetic distance between the Hungarian György Kurtág and the American Morton Feldman—both born a hundred years ago—will serve as a useful counterpoint to highlight oppositions or possible affinities between two composers who, in very different ways, experimented with compositional solutions that required performers and audiences to transcend the confines of the conventional. A different kind of "counterpoint" connects Ada Gentile to Goffredo Petrassi, also her teacher. From different generations, both trained in Rome, they pursue two distinct research paths that place them in tune with new European languages, while maintaining a connection to the Italian musical tradition. Gentile was also the first to invite Kurtag to Italy, in the 1980s, to the festival she directed. Both trained as pianists, Gentile and Kurtag also share a refined sense of irony that at times runs through their work, as we will see in the upcoming concerts. This year's kaleidoscopic overview of the diverse poetics of contemporary music will also include flute pieces by Simone Fontanelli, a composer much admired by Kurtag and now director of the Institut für Neue Musik at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and Sixto Herrero, an eclectic Spanish composer who has previously taught our masterclasses. The series will conclude with a performance inspired by Stockhausen's Mikrophonie, curated by the School of Electronic Music. The programme concludes with a fifth and final concert, after the summer, which will offer a series of pieces for violin duo, a point of intersection with another series of three concerts, "Conversations for Two or More Violins," dedicated to this particular instrumentation from various eras. Unlike the four previous concerts, which were performed entirely by our students, this last one will be performed by our colleagues Claudio Andriani and Francesco Parrino.

The curtain will rise on Thursday, April 23rd at 6:30 pm at the Pittaluga Auditorium with an inaugural concert. The concert will open with the sonic hypnosis of Morton Feldman (King of Denmark and Vertical Thoughts 1), where sound emerges from silence almost like a physical object, before moving on to the miniaturized rigor of the 12 Microludes and the celebrated Játékok by György Kurtág.

The dialogue will continue with the elegance of Goffredo Petrassi, whose Invenzioni and Suoni notturni will be performed, pieces that demonstrate his extraordinary ability to reinvent tradition. The circle will close with the voice of Ada Gentile with Un suono lontano, a piece that embodies the timbre wisdom and expressive sincerity that characterize her.

These scores will be brought to life by an ensemble composed of Conservatory students. Taking turns on stage will be M. Montaldi, E. Fumagalli, R. Glinac, E. Lucchetti, E. Sedini, T. Todarello, M. Giribaldi, M. Solonar, S. Molla, L. Furini Jampa, L. Benvegnù, G. Vowles, M. Assandri, M. Avio, J. Cavallotti, G. Faragli, and D. Beltran.

The series will continue, exploring the "varied ritornello" of the four key composers, with two events in May (Thursday the 7th and Friday the 29th). These will feature performances of significant pieces by the four selected composers, including Feldman's "Three Clarinet, Cello, and Piano"; Kurtág's "Kafka-Fragmente" (1st selection); Petrassi's "Ala"; and Ada Gentile's "Quick Moments." Tuesday the 16th will also feature contributions from the Conservatory's School of Electronic Music, including a performance of a cornerstone of electroacoustic music, Stockhausen's "Mikrophonie I." The series will then officially conclude after the summer break on Wednesday, September 30th, with a special event dedicated to the violin duo, featuring teachers Claudio Andriani and Francesco Parrino, who will perform pieces by Bartòk, Berio, Lanza, and Schnittke.

In-depth Analysis, The Main Composers Featured in the Festival

The music of New Yorker Morton Feldman (1926-1987) offers us a rarely seen and risky approach to 20th-century musical research. Few, in fact, have so emptied the time allotted to a given piece of music in a concert. Long durations filled with silences or resonances carve out sidereal spaces between sonic-musical events, and this rarefaction inevitably leads to a mutation in listening, which loses the "tension toward" that has characterized music in a narrative sense for centuries. Feldman's music engages in a dialogue with painting (Rothko's Abstract Expressionism, for example) and invites us to concentrate on the moment: its meaning emerges as a precipitate of countless "here and nows." But be careful, this immanence does not authorize the audience to indifferent contemplation; on the contrary, it pushes them to pay attention to the infinite variations, to the secret life to which the musical material is subjected.

György Kurtág (1926) is a Hungarian composer. Like Ligeti, with whom he was a friend, he initially followed the path laid out by Bartók, then developed an original language that matured through his knowledge of A. Webern and O. Messiaen. His music often surprises listeners with the radical choices that inspire it: he uses the most diverse musical materials, be they melodies, harsh dissonances or more familiar chords, 'lyrical' or 'theatrical' gestures, complex or incredibly simple textures, always pursuing a precise expressive idea. A rich sonic universe that offers us an uninterrupted compositional exploration from the 1950s to the present.

Goffredo Petrassi (1904 - 2003) was educated in Rome. Although his early work was influenced by a cultural environment focused on the past (neo-Baroque, neoclassicism), his knowledge of the 20th-century European scene and a remarkable curiosity and intellectual openness pushed him toward an increasingly original and independent language. References to traditional forms and styles will continue, but they will never be banal or facile; for example, the use of ancient instruments, such as the harpsichord, takes on a new and experimental flavor.

Ada Gentile (born 1947), trained in Rome, studied with Petrassi at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia and is the creator of one of the longest-running contemporary music festivals (Nuovi Spazi Musicali since 1978). Her music ranges from solo and chamber music to orchestral and choral repertoire. Always attentive to detail, with expert and refined instrumentation, her language unfolds evolving soundscapes that, over the years, have incorporated diverse inspirations: dramatic, lyrical, ironic, always authentic.