(by Matilde Anghinoni) Thursday, April 20, Teatro Ristori will host one of the most intriguing concerts of the season. Aldo Sisillo will conduct the orchestra Virtuosi Italiani and the flutist Massimo Mercelli, solo guest. On the program Infinti Universi – Infinite Universes –, played for the first time and composed by Claudio Scannavini, the Concerto per flauto n.2 – Flute Concert n.2 – by Michael Nyman and Dante Concerto by Gabriel Prokofiev, grandson of the famous Sergej.
Claudio Scannavini will open the night with Infiniti Universi, a piece that “comes from the need to observe a small musical cell under the microscope”, explains the master. Scannavini, after studying at the conservatories of Bologna and Milan, focused his interest on the perceptual phenomena analyzed also through music informatics. “Infinite sound universes – he explains – that appear to us and that we seem to recognize, but then slip away, worlds of sounds that are only imagined, we believe to find comfort in the recognition of the most common features of compositional languages, but in reality when we become aware of where we are, this consciousness escapes us immanently transforming itself into something else. If it is true that music like other “languages” can be used to warn about the present, this piece is meant to suggest that we are looking from the wrong side of the lens. Instead of magnified, the world appears to us distant and merged with other realities, no less concrete than the universe to which we belong”.
From the infinite universes described by Scannavini, to the music of “power, passion, instinct, pain” of one of the greatest living composers, Michael Nymar, born from the minimalist current of Reich and Glass and then delved into new musical trajectories given by the union of folk, electronic, sacred and classical music. Nymar dedicated the Flute Concert n.2 to Massimo Mercelli who will perform it with the orchestra Virtuosi italiani. Mercelli, first flute at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice at the age of 19, won numerous awards including the Premio Francesco Cilea, the International Music Days Competition and the International Stresa Competition.
The focus of the night will be Dante Concerto, played by Massimo Mercelli and composed by Gabriel Prokofiev, who will be present in the theater. Prokofiev, fascinated by the emotional range of Dante’s Inferno of “darkness and despair, but also sadness, regret, doubt, and even hope and love”, gave life, starting with some of his original sketches, to a concert for flute, a suggestive musical journey in search of Dante’s emotions. To allow the music to evoke images of the journey to Hell, the only narrator is the flute itself. Prokofiev combines his experience in classical and symphonic compositions, film soundtracks and electronic music for the creation of contemporary works symbolizing the intersection of past and future.
