The Great Academies, the Masters and the Students

A series of concerts curated by Antonio Caggiano

MarCH – JUNE 2025

The Great Academies, the Masters and the Students is a series of four concerts, scheduled from March to June 2025, which aims to celebrate the exceptional link between musical tradition and emerging talent. Each concert of the season sees the alternation of established masters and their promising students, all from the most prestigious European music academies. The series offers the opportunity to listen to performances that mix the past and the present, the consolidated mastery and the energy of young musicians, for a rich and engaging musical experience.

At the Edge of the Night: Fragments of Light and Shadow
The first concert of of the series features the young musicians of Trio Concept, a group of three extraordinary talents, currently studying at the Hochschule in Basel. The ensemble will explore a territory in which “sound seems to dissolve at the edges of perception, like an echo that gets lost in the night”, as they themselves affirm. Their musical offering “goes beyond the simple question of dynamics or instrumental writing”; it is a profound reflection on the fragility of music, on its elusive nature and on the alternation between light and darkness. The programme includes pieces by authors such as Lili Boulanger – who died when she was just twenty four years old, sister of the very famous composition teacher Nadia - Kaija Saariaho, Maurice Ravel, Salvatore Sciarrino and Wolfgang Rihm. Each piece tells a story of distance, transformation and mystery, giving the audience an experience suspended between the tangible and the intangible.

Virtuosity and Passion: The Double Bass between Past and Present
In the second concert of the series, Maestro Giuseppe Ettorre, double bass teacher at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena and first double bass at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, will be joined by his brillant student, Fabio Buzzi, currently first double bass at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, and by the pianist, Pierluigi Di Tella. This concert, in which virtuosity is the protagonist, will guide the audience on a journey through the world of the double bass, with a programme ranging from historical to contemporary compositions. It will start with Giovanni Bottesini, move onto Franz Schubert and Gustav Mahler, up to the present day with a piece by Nicola Sani dedicated to Ettorre, which had its world premiere at La Scala in 2024. A concert that, thanks to the meeting between masters and students, will offer the audience not only a virtuosity of the highest level, but also a reflection on the transmission of musical tradition through the generations. An event aimed at lovers of chamber music and those who want to discover the double bass in a new, original light.

Repetition and Rhythm
The third concert of the series features the Chigiana Percussion Ensemble, a group in residence at the Accademia Chigiana. Made up of the best students of the summer advanced training courses, the ensemble boasts a notable concert career. In addition to participating in all the years of the Chigiana Summer Festival, its prestigious curriculum includes performances at the Ravello Festival, the Ravenna Festival and the MAXXI Museum in Rome. The programme will focus mainly, but not only, on minimalist music. Spectators will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the radical minimalism of the masters, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, protagonists of a musical revolution with their repetitive and hypnotic structures. The concert will continue with works by some of the main disciples of this movement, such as the American Julia Wolpe and the Italian Giovanni Sollima, who have pushed minimalism in new expressive directions. The piece by Freedman / Samuels, characterised by obvious jazz influences, will introduce an improvisational and rhythmic dimension to the performance. The energy and the expressive power of this group will make the musical experience a journey of high emotional tension.

Music from Exile
The season concludes with a concert by the clarinetist José Luis Estelles – teacher at the Hochschule for Music and Dance Köln, Conservatorio superior de Musica San Sebastian – together with the pianist Amedeo Salvato.

Music from Exile explores the musical production of composers who fled, were imprisoned or were persecuted by those in power for racial, artistic and political reasons. The concert opens with the Kaddish by Maurice Ravel, one of the oldest Jewish prayers, linked to the idea of loss, and continues with the Sonata by Moisej Vajnberg, a Polish composer who, to escape the Nazis, fled to the Soviet Union where, despite his friendship with Dmitrij Shostakovich, he was placed on the blacklist of artists accused of “formalism” and arrested in 1953. From captivity in Stalag VIII-A, where Olivier Messiaen composed Quatuor pour la fin du temps in 1940, we move on to the rhythmic and sonorous rainbows of György Ligeti, whose artistic production is decisively marked by his escape to Vienna in the aftermath of the 1956 Budapest uprising. In the same year that Messiaen composed his Quatuor, the Spaniard Julián Bautista fled from the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and took refuge in Argentina where he wrote the Fantasia Española of our programme. The concert ends with a mix of Latin jazz and classical music by Paquito D’Rivera, a Cuban clarinetist and composer, who has been a political refugee in the USA since 1980.

The season, The Great Academies, the Masters and the Students thus offers an extraordinary overview of the new generations of musicians who, under the guidance of great masters, are contributing to the history of music of our time. An opportunity to appreciate the talent, the passion and the innovation that animates the classrooms of the most prestigious music academies in Europe.

Antonio Caggiano
Artistic Director for musical activity at Dello Scompiglio

7 JUNE 2025
AT 7.30 pm

José Luis Estelles | Amedeo Salvato

Music from Exile

music by Ravel, Weinberg, Messiaen, Ligeti, Bautista, d’Rivera