Voice, Vocality and Singing

Concert Season

We continue the programme, Voce, vocalità e canto, the musical season curated by Antonio Caggiano, which in 2024 presents an artistic itinerary of eight concerts focused on the voice and singing, in the spaces of the Tenuta Dello Scompiglio.

“The chosen path”, specifies Caggiano, “does not pretend to exhaust such a vast and varied theme, but aims to explore it through multiple facets; the voice, the sound-verse up to the word, monody and polyphony, the song of nature, voices in popular culture, and instrumental singing.”

Following the first part of musical events presented from March to June 2024, the season continues with four concerts, scheduled from September to December.

It begins on 28^th September with the UT Insieme Vocale-Consonante concert which achieved international popularity after winning the European Grand Prix for Choral Music in 2016 in Varna, Bulgaria. The ensemble presents a promenade concert in different places at Dello Scompiglio, titled Senso, non senso, doppio senso (Sense, Nonsense, Double Entendre): a programme that, through the interpretation of the word, leads the audience to savour the relationship between voice and text, between thought and illusion, between illusion and truth.

The second appointment features the duo Caggiano-Sorrentino and the young string quartet, Sincronie, with the concert Many have no speech (title borrowed from a beautiful album by Michael Mantler), which focuses on the voice of the marginalised and those who are not able to carve out their own space within society, as in the case of the piece by Gavin Bryars, in which we hear the heart breaking singing of a homeless person throughout the entire composition, or the piece by Nicola Sani, freely inspired by a canvas by Mark Rothko, an American painter who took his own life because of his depression, but also, and above all to “be out of the way”.                       

The season continues with Recital for Cathy, a tribute by Alda Caiello to Cathy Berberian, which picks up the title of the piece dedicated by Luciano Berio to the great vocalist. Inspired by her illustrious colleague, Caiello creates a place where the two great artists meet and tell their stories.

The season ends with the show, Voci svelate (Voices Revealed), a fascinating dialogue between the voice of Ljuba Bergamelli and the percussion of Ars Ludi, which together create a path that begins with Scelsi’s Canti del Capricorno, passes though the myth of Psychopompos by Battistelli and arrives at the exaltation of nature with Rain Tree by Toru Takemitsu and Elegy by Guo Wen Jing.

Antonio Caggiano
artistic director of Dello Scompiglio musical events

19 oCTOBER 2024

AT 19.30

concert

Duo Caggiano/Sorrentino - Quartetto Sincronie

Many have no speech

programmE

Gian Francesco Malipiero, Quartetto per archi n. 4

Gavin Bryars, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet for electric guitar, vibraphone and string quartet

Nicola Sani, Four Darks in Red for string quartet and electronics

Lukas Foss, Paradigm for percussion, electric guitar and string quartet

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Quartetto Sincronie

Houman Vaziri, Agnese Maria Balestracci  violins
Arianna Bloise  viola
Alessandro Mazzacane  cello
Sergio Sorrentino  electric guitar

Antonio Caggiano  vibraphone and percussion

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Many have no speech, a title borrowed from an exceptional album by Michael Mantler, is the concert that gives voice to the marginalised. The curtain opens with the Quartetto n.4  by Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973), composed by the Venetian Maestro in 1934. Malipiero’s fantastic sound world, made up of echoes of ancient dances, ghosts of sweet polyphonies from the past, is darkened by an underlying feeling of unease, daughter of the dark times in which the composition saw the light. In fact, in 1934, Malipiero’s work (based on a text by Luigi Pirandello) La favola del figlio cambiato, was censored and banned by Mussolini, who would not tolerate a scene set in a brothel and forbade any performance of it in Italian theatres. In the following years, Malipiero was on the front line in defending the weak. From 1943 to 1945, during the Nazi occupation, he managed to save both students and teachers of the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory in Venice, of which he was director, from deportation to the concentration camps and from recruitment. 

After the horror of the Second World War, marginalisation and social exclusion did not cease to exist but took different forms. The voice of a London tramp seems to contain in itself the essence of suffering, of universal pain, of loneliness without consolation. And the pain can only be alleviated by a prayer and a gentle caress. A sonic caress that Gavin Bryars  (1943), a brilliant English composer, manages to turn into reality thanks to the delicate instrumental writing of Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971). The disjointed and heart rending song of the anonymous homeless man is broadcast on a loop and, second by second, minute by minute, is wrapped in a wonderful and delicate harmonisation, gradually entrusted to a group of instruments (in this performance to strings, vibraphone, guitar and pre-recorded sounds), in an emotional and deeply moving crescendo. Hearing a performance of Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet is a real experience, a happening of collective consciousness, more than simply listening to a piece of music. 

The suffering prayer of Jesus’ Blood  is the prelude to a piece dedicated to the painful figure of the American visual artist Mark Rothko (1903-1970). An absolute genius of the twentieth century, Rothko has given humanity works of timeless beauty, with an all-encompassing visual impact. The works, often characterised by few and large bands of colour, lead us to observe the infinite. Rothko lived in the deep pain of his depression, never managing to find a comfortable space in this world. After art, the artist found in suicide the only way out of suffering. It is to Rothko that Nicola Sani (1961), an important Italian composer, dedicates Four Darks in Red (2009). Composed for string quartet and soundtrack, the work develops, in a fascinating way, the relationship between the acoustic sound of the live quartet and the electronic space of the pre-recorded track (recorded by the Turin String Quartet). In Rothko’s painting, from which the title of the composition is derived, four rectangles of different sizes and tones are distributed vertically on a dark red background. The spatial arrangement of the quartet, both graphically in the score and in the live performance, follows the organisation of the shapes in Rothko’s canvass, with the two violins at the ends and cello and viola at the centre. The listener will be able to witness the fascinating perceptive game played by the encounter between the roughness of the timbric masses of the electronic space and the relief of the forms that emerge, like dark and indistinct objects from the background. 

The concert closes with a fascinating and powerful composition, rarely performed in Italy. The voice, understood as an act of liberation and 1968 protest against marginalisation, is the basis of the collective performance of Paradigm (1968) in which electric guitar, percussion and three instruments support the sound of the American composer Lukas Foss (1922-2009). It is a written composition and guided improvisation, with tribal charm, where the percussionist directs the other instrumentalists, often using phrases and cries, in a rhythmic delirium without interruption. The musicians are called to give full expression and extroversion, to perform Foss’s instructions with force. The rhythmic and strong episodes alternate with pointillistic sections (some with short sounds, others with sustained sounds) of pure instrumental timbres, more calm and level. Paradigm, thus closes with an act of pure formal and resonant rebellion. 

Many have no speech, is a concert that aims to give a voice to those who fail to have a voice within the often unfortunately cacophonous chorus of our society. 

Sergio Sorrentino