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PREMIO
MAESTRO 2007
Federico Incardona (Palermo, 13 May 1958
– 29 March 2006)
He began to work as a self-taught composer in his adolescence.
Starting from 1974 he assiduously attended the Institute
of History of Music at Palermo University: he studied under
the guidance of Paolo Emilio Carapezza and Antonino Titone,
who had organized the International Weeks of New Music in
Palermo (1960-68) and edited Collage, a review of new music
and contemporary visual arts (1963-70). His fluid and abundant
vein immediately thickened into shrewd aphorisms: his debut
came in 1977 at the Politeama with Mit höchster Gewalt,
composed for the soloists of the Sicilian Symphony Orchestra.
His formation was grounded not only in history and analysis
of music, from the Greeks to the present, but also on an
intense philosophical and literary culture. After four years
of study and silence (during which he made friends with
the composers Sylvano Bussotti, Franco Evangelisti, Luigi
Nono and Camillo Togni and the philosopher Heinz-Klaus Metzger,
who influenced him in various ways) his most fertile season
began (1981-89). At the 1981 Venice Biennial Avec un morne
embrassement, a chamber symphony, brought him to international
attention: in it Enzo Restagno admired «the agglutinated
and dark sonority, dense in obscure echoes» and «the
will for song […] toned down by tragic exhaustion».
There followed an impressive series of masterpieces, among
which Sweet may the wind be, for six instruments (Pontino
Festival, 1982); Des Freundes Umnachtung, symphonic dialogues
for big orchestra (Venice Biennial, 1985; Prague Europe
Festival, 1993); On distance, for three instruments (Amsterdam
Holland Festival, 1986); Postlude to the nights, for big
orchestra (Palermo, Rome and Milan, 1988); Mehr Licht, on
verses by Constantine Cavafy, for soprano, violin, piano
and eleven instruments (Gibellina Orestiadi, 1989; Warsaw
Autumn, 1994); “Malor me bat”. Graffiti from
Ockeghem: for Luigi Nono, for string trio, three blown bottles
and crotales (Palermo, 1995).
«The incorporation of eroticism in sound», the
composer declared, «comes about through a fierce rule,
which is that of serialism». In this connection, the
source and compositional law of almost all his mature works
was the dodecaphonic series that Webern had planned for
Konzert op. 32 (which his violent death prevented him from
writing): he produced enharmonic series (by quarters of
tone) of twenty-four notes, which constitute the souls of
Incardona’s music. These are embodied in tenebrous
and resplendent sonorous bodies of carbon/diamond: in-depth
exploration of the most rigorous radicalism – as the
composer himself wrote of Evangelisti – produces «the
unheard-of flash of sound purified of all hedonism, the
ferment of unbelievable mirages with simple structures».
After an eclipse of over five years, his genius revived
in his last years, almost a nova star, with the greatest
splendour: his last great symphonic works sounded out, Per
fretum febris for orchestra and choir of children’s
voices (2000), I have asked the dust for orchestra (2002)
and The Rest to the Shades for recorder, double bass and
orchestra (2003) at the Politeama in his city, where he
had debuted a quarter of a century before. There he totally
enacted the Socratic intuition pursued by Beethoven and
Mahler, Schönberg and Webern, that music is the supreme
form of philosophy: indeed, in the intense expressionism
of his music, the construction is always at the service
of a dialectical discourse that is dense and deep, but –
in his last works – as clear and fluid as the melody
of Bellini.
And he was also a great teacher; under his beneficent influence
a generation of young Sicilian composers formed. His teaching
took place at his own home, but above all at the Institute
of History of Music (since 2000 the Music Section of the
Aglaia Department) and at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy
of the University of Palermo. The manuscripts of his works
are kept in Palermo, at his flat in Via Porta di Castro
and in the CIMS Archive at the Mediateca Comunale (Municipal
Media Library) at Palazzo Ziino: the publishers are Casa
Ricordi and RAI Trade.
Paolo Emilio Carapezza***Self-portrait
He was born in Palermo in 1958 [13 May].
Rigorously self-taught, he identifies his linguistic-cognitive
pathway in intense exploration of the works of Mahler and
of the Second Vienna School. In Webern he recognizes not
so much the “superstition of the number” but
rather, on the basis of a reading by Maderna and Nono, the
radiant synergy of rigor and emotion, the ethical conclusion
of Romanticism. He sees as fundamental his attendance at
the Institute of History of Music at the University of Palermo
and the ensuing friendship with Paolo Emilio Carapezza,
Angelo Faja, Francesco Pennisi, Aldo Clementi, Antonino
Titone, Michele Canzoneri and Aurelio Pes.
He studied both the musical patrimony of the Sicilian Renaissance
(Pietro Vinci, Antonio Il I Verso) and the extreme manifestations
of contemporary ideas on composition: Kagel, Donatoni, Evangelisti,
etc. Under the guidance of Paolo Emilio Carapezza he listened
for the first time to Due voci by Sylvano Bussotti: the
work, which was to remain indelibly engraved in him, was
for him a powerful testimony to the possibility of continuing
“to think” in music after Webern.
Between 1975 and 1977 he wrote Memoria for string quartet;
Due Lieder su versi di Kavafis for voice and instruments;
and Mit höchster Gewalt for instrumental ensemble,
his first work performed in public. His friendship with
Roberto Pagano, at that time the artistic director of the
Sicilian Symphony Orchestra, also allowed him “to
absorb” orchestral thought “in the field”,
thus revealing his peculiar inclination to consider any
organic treatise as part of an exhaustive, utopian, symphonic
“Organon”.
There followed a period of silence and linguistic stasis,
due to the impossible attempt to reconcile the extreme destructive
thought of Kagel and the sublime aphasia of Evangelisti
with the red-hot inheritance of the ethical-emotional “structuralism”
of Mahler and Webern, exemplified in a summary form, in
the present, by the works of Bussotti. The meeting first
with the latter, and then with Heinz-Klaus Metzger, was
to be decisive for overcoming the crisis.
Between 1980 and 1981 he wrote Avec un morne embrassement
for small orchestra, performed at the Venice Biennial and
published by G. Ricordi & C. From that moment on he
methodically faced exploration of dodecaphonic thought,
which, starting from the study of Fünf Klavierstücke
op. 23 by Schönberg (“Composition with the [12]
notes”) led him to the Webernian series of the incomplete
op. 32, a retro-progressive synthesis of the sonorous space
of western music and an occult starting point for his formulation
of a “dynamic” panserialism. Fundamental, in
this respect, was meeting Camillo Togni and studying his
works.
In the Favara-Tiby collection of Sicilian folk songs he
again found the Mahlerian ethic of pain not sublimated but
objectual: the perception in corpore of this mental condition
in what is left of folk culture and the reconsideration
of the Sicilian Renaissance polyphony that was nurtured
by it led him to think concretely of the possibility of
a “very new” language that, proceeding from
Mahler and Webern, was rooted in the physical depth of the
race. Palermo and its quarters, the “lost voice”
of its adolescents, thus became an “experimental centre
of the World”, the privileged laboratory of the temptation
of extreme compression, in the search for a compositional
and human procedure that was really, paraphrasing Kolisch
as deciphered by Metzger, “perpetual tradition as
permanent revolution”.
Of great importance were the meetings and friendship with
Augusto Vismara, who was to reveal to him the life and work
of Giuseppe Ganduscio, an unknown theoretician and singer
of remote Sicilian melodies; with Roberto Fabbriciani and
Ciro Scarponi, who were to reveal to him in detail the compositional
ideas of the extreme season of Luigi Nono. Meeting the latter
and initiation into the thought of Cage, the psychagogues
being Ulrike Brandt and Alfonso Fratteggiani Bianchi, were
to add to certainty a doubt about method that was at last
fertile.
PREMIO
MAESTRO 2006
Paolo Emilio Carapezza
«The
power to communicate with others is Novelli's dominant interest.
An exclusive, morbid interest. The avalanche of material
that risks submerging him provokes the fear of not being
able to communicate; hence his drastic gesture: of the material
he uses only the light and colourless foam and bursts hopelessly
into logos, into discourse, into the means of communication
par excellence. He reaches the signs of the alphabet, undoubtedly
conventional but safe: from the discharge opened up there
gushes forth now a stream, now a brook; through excessive
heat he can get caught up on a vowel, on an A, for a terribly
long time: but he speaks, he cries. There is no danger of
remaining covered or walled in by that light delicate foam
of matter, or of drowning in it; but it is still possible
for others to take no interest, to be indifferent to what
he has to say: and so he excites their curiosity by half
saying things and making people think of great mysteries,
hiding his fragments of sentences to allow people to enjoy
finding them, covering them with that sweet foam, sweet
to see, to touch… to eat».
It will have surprised you to realise that to begin this
brief tribute to the famous musicologist and dear friend
Paolo Emilio Carapezza, I have chosen to quote a piece he
wrote, devoted not to a musician but to a painter. But I
wanted to show you the vastness of his interests at so young
an age. The fact is that the piece is the most distant in
time, among the published ones, that I know by him. For
an exhibition that brought to Palermo for the first time
three great Italian painters, Novelli, Scialoja and Turcato,
and which was inaugurated on 18 March 1961 at the Galleria
Tindari which I directed at that time, Carapezza wrote the
presentation note. He was only 24 years old, having been
born in 1937; see how mature his thought already was and
how terse his writing! The year after, on 7 October, in
this same room, he was to give a lecture entitled: "The
Constitution of the New Music". The lecture was given
in the Third International New Music Week; Carapezza laid
the foundations of his critical reflection on the music
of the second half of the twentieth century, which he was
to develop following the creative pathway of the many great
composers of our time. With the certain gaze and prodigious
formal synthesis that he still has today: just a couple
of months ago, perhaps even less, he did a lecture in Dublin
on the Catania musician Aldo Clementi, one of the greatest
living composers, who he had already dealt with speaking
of Informel 3, performed in a concert in that Third Week.
But in February from Rome he had written to me: «I
have played Ricercari by Frescobaldi». Frescobaldi
like Clementi: Carapezza considered at one and the same
time, and with the same acumen, the old and the new. Thus
in 1970 he was able to publish with me the last volume of
«Collage», a journal devoted to music and the
visual arts in those years, and the first one of an enterprise
which he had set about on an impulse from our teacher Luigi
Rognoni: the series «Sicilian Renaissance Music».
Already 24 volumes have been published, and at least 24
more should be published. Big-format volumes, impeccable
for academic completeness and typographic appearance: an
imposing monument erected by modern musicological research
in honour of our music of yesterday, with the collaboration
of Italian and overseas researchers and first of all with
the precious aid of the co-editors Maria Antonella Balsano
and Giuseppe Collisani. Here too I could quote not one but
many names on which Carapezza's gaze has fallen, that period
having been as rich in music for us as the present moment:
a second Renaissance that he has not only studied and revealed,
but experienced as a protagonist.
And from the 21st century I could go back to well beyond
the 16th, to ancient Greece. However, I will resist the
temptation to rattle off data and dates: if I simply had
to read you the list of his publications, I would go well
beyond the time that has allotted to me. However, I cannot
end without mentioning Mozart and the great Da Ponte trilogy,
on which he gives us exemplary studies, now collected in
the book Mozart and Da Ponte. And always, from one apex
to the other of western musical culture, Carapezza's thought
has flowed back into academic teaching: a lectio magistralis
that has continued without a break for more than forty years.
Antonino
Titone
PREMIO
MAESTRO 2005
Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi
Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi was born in Rome in 1934, and followed
his family to Palermo after the war. In 1957 he was adopted
by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, writer of the world-famous
novel Il Gattopardo that inspired Luchino Visconti to direct
the homonymous 1963 movie (starring Alain Delon, Burt Lancaster
and Claudia Cardinale, among others). Prince Lampedusa was
his distant cousin, to whom he had been particularly close
during the last three years of the novelist’s life (1954-57).
Professor Lanza Tomasi has been the editor of his literary
legacy and has completed the task with the publishing of his
complete works, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Opere, Milan
1995, and of a biography, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - Una
biografia per immagini, Palermo 1998, followed by a revised
edition, I luoghi del Gattopardo, Palermo 2001.
The former director of the Italian cultural Institute of New
York, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi is a full professor of Music
History at the University of Palermo, and has enjoyed a long
association with the major opera houses of Italy as an artistic
administrator. His scholarly work in musicology has focused
primarily on stylistic analysis and reception studies of 19th
Century Italian opera and 20th Century music. In the field
of lyric theater he has promoted the revival of rarely-performed
operas and new tendencies in contemporary musical theater,
including commissioning renowned painters and sculptors for
set design rather than traditional set designers.
Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi was one of the first to bring exponents
of the American school to Italy, commissioning Morton Feldman’s
Neither to a text by Samuel Beckett (Rome 1976), and Philip
Glass and Robert Wilson’s The Civil Wars (Rome 1983).
The artists whom he has commissioned to design productions
for the Rome Opera include Michelangelo Pistoletto (Neither),
Mario Ceroli (Paul Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna, 1977,
and Giacomo Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, 1979),
and Arnaldo Pomodoro (Gioachino Rossini’s Semiramide,
1982).
In 1970 he was appointed head of music history at the University
of Salerno and in 1980 he became a full professor. Since 1983
he has been a professor of Music History at the University
of Palermo, and until his appointment in New York he has been
Chair of the Education Department. He is Vice-President of
ADUIM (the Italian Association of University Professors of
Music).
In 1965 he began his work as a musical manager and gradually
became the artistic administrator of various musical institutions:
Rome’s Accademia Filarmonica (1973-75 and 1988-92),
the Teatro Massimo of Palermo (1971-75), the Teatro dell’Opera
of Rome (1976-84), the RAI, Rome Symphonic Orchestra and Chorus
(1984-92) and the Teatro Comunale of Bologna (1992-95). He
was the general director of the Roma Europa Arte e Cultura
Foundation, and consultant on the reconstruction of the Vittorio
Emanuele Theater of Messina.
In 1996 he has been appointed Director of the Italian Cultural
Institute in New York. He organized a great Berio revival
at Carnegie Hall and many exhibits of Italian Art at the MoMA,
the Metropolitan Museum, and P.S.1.
Professor Lanza Tomasi left New York in February 2000 at the
end of a four year term with the Italian Foreign Ministry.
In February 2001 he was appointed general manager of Naples’
Teatro di San Carlo.
During the early years of his career he published various
works on art history, specializing in Sicilian architecture,
before dedicating himself entirely to music, research, reviewer
and management. He is fluent in English, French an German.
PREMIO
MAESTRO 2004
Bruno Canino
Bruno Canino was born in Naples on January 2, 1936. He graduated
with a degree in piano and composition from the Conservatorio
di Milano. In 1956 and 1958, he won awards at the Bolzano
piano competition and won a similar award in Darmstadt in
1960.
He has played for the most important music societies and
festivals in Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, China,
Malaysia, Russia, South America, New Zealand and Australia.
He has performed as part of a piano duo with Antonio Ballista
for the past 50 years and has also been a member of the
chamber music ensemble Trio di Milano, with colleagues Mariana
Sirbu and Rocco Filippini, for the past 30 years.
As a soloist, he has played under conductors such as Maderna,
Muti, Abbado, Chailly, Sawallish, Berio and Boulez as well
as with orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, the
Berlin Philharmonic, Santa Cecilia, the Orchestre National
de France, Concertgebouw of Amsterdam and the Filarmonica
della Scala. Bruno Canino has had the honor of giving premiere
performances of compositions by Luciano Berio, Ivan Fedele,
Niccolò Castiglioni, Sylvano Bussotti, Iannis Xenakis,
Wolfgang Rihm and Mauricio Kagel.
This internationally renowned pianist has also taught master
classes in Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, France and Switzerland.
Additionally, from 1991 to 2002, he conducted piano master
classes for the Konservatorium Für Musik in Bern. He
was also Music Section Director of the Venice Biennale from
1999 to 2001.
A noted composer himself, Bruno Canino has written over
30 musical works, both published and un-published for soloists,
duos, trios and chamber music ensembles. He has recorded
for the RCA, Deutsche Grammophon, Angel and Orfeo labels.
In 1997, he also published a book entitled, Vademecum of
the chamber-music pianist.
PREMIO
MAESTRO 2003
ELIODORO SOLLIMA
Eliodoro
Sollima (Marsala 1926 - Palermo 2000), a composer and pianist,
a teacher of composition at the Palermo conservatory, of
which he was the director for nine years, composed symphonic,
chamber and stage music. His compositions are published
by Shott, Heinrschoven, Curci, Berben, Sonzogno and Mnemes.
He composed music on commission for RAI (for the Scarlatti
Orchestra in Naples), ARC (for the Teatro Nuovo in Milan),
INDA (for the Greek theatre in Syracuse), the Teatro Massimo
in Palermo (Pimpinella), the Sicilian Symphony Orchestra
(Threnody for Cello and Orchestra) and other bodies and
associations. Among the conductors that performed his works
we can mention E. Gracis, Z. Pesko, M. Inoue, G. Aimone
Marsan, G. Ferro, A. Ceccato, F. Scaglia, O. Ziino, K. Martin,
D. Machado, P. Bellugi and N. Wiss. He had intense activity
as pianist, playing in numerous cities in Europe and America,
as well as for Deutsche Rundfunk, Radio Schweiss and RAI.
On a proposal from Arturo Benedetto Michelangeli he participated
in the first Italian performance of the Kommerkonzert of
A. Berg at the Teatro Nuovo in Milan. For twenty years,
together with the violinist S. Cicero and the cellist G.
Perriera, he was in the Palermo Trio, which in 1978 was
awarded the Golden Diapason. In 1983 he formed the Sollima
Ensemble with his children, Giovanni on the cello, Donatella
on the piano, Luigi on the flute; he was also a music critic
of the newspaper «L’Ora» in Palermo and
president of the New Music University group.
Eliodoro Sollima: “Self-portrait”
If in a single word I had to find a formula that, even though
simplistically, was to define me as a composer, very briefly
I would write: not aligned. Aware also of how much this
non-alignment has involved in terms of ostracism. I have
paid, turning it upside-down in a secluded creative isolation,
for my refusal to accept the impact that the neo-avant-gardes
had, especially in my city, with the Weeks of New Music
in the sixties or thereabouts. Quite the opposite, instead:
this wave of provocation and renewal was welcome to me,
because the impact could only be positive. But it was certainly
not a revolution – and time has given confirmation
of it – but on the contrary an episode that was to
serve for an evolution. It is certainly not by chance if
a lot of my compositions, after those stormy years, are
entitled “Evolutions”, numbered progressively.
Not the violence and the break, not the free gesture –
like a lot of performances since that time – but achievement
of awareness allowing development. In the sixties I did
my “Variations concertante” in which I express
a very open vision of the twentieth century; I do not abandon
seriality, which is present, though filtered by my compositional
approach, but rather there is – and it is something
which I have never foregone, even in the ensuing years –
an instrumental commitment. At that time Roberto Pagano
wrote in a Palermo newspaper: «Only careful examination
of the score can allow identification of the arsenal of
artifices that serves as a support to the architecture of
the work: the exceptional merit of the musician is having
succeeded in avoiding all arid academicism, always subordinating
the employment of so rich a form to the most justified expressive
necessities».
I have sought, starting from my Sonata for cello and piano
of 1948, to trace out a poetic able not to exclude any linguistic,
traditional or innovative inheritance that was above all
at the service of refined timbric research seen as a priority.
The wish to investigate the horizons opened up by the New
Music became larger in the composition technique of the
“Evolutions” already mentioned; as I wrote in
“How music is born”, it reflects experience
of more recent acquisitions with an inevitable semiological
development. In “Evolutions 6”, for instance,
written in 1972, which I consider in some respects one of
my most technically and linguistically advanced compositions,
the employment of the dodecaphonic technique is expressed
in a dovetail structure, sustained by a rhythmic and timbric
crescendo. It is an evolutive aesthetical intent that was
already underlined in my “Three movements” (for
piano, violin and cello) of 1968, a work which, as Pina
Sciacca wrote in «Cronache musicali», «strongly
leads us into complex contemporary linearity, framed nevertheless
by the usual traits of an ineludible classicism».
I am happy here to remind the reader that, for this composition,
Isaac Stern wrote to me: “magnificently made work.”
Very good of him.
My compositional poetic has found a good exegete, speaking
of my “Concerto for strings” (1968), in Gioacchino
Lanza Tomasi, who wrote: «Sollima is a Sicilian musician
who is more mid-European than I remembered. With this Concerto
he gives us a work close to the contrapuntal seriousness
of solemn figures like Franck Martin or the juvenile Bartók
of the ‘Portraits’. Naturally referring to these
or other precedents means little in relation to the product
that on the suggestion of a given twentieth-century musical
style Sollima succeeds in working out. Now his principal
quality is to evoke this or other sonorous worlds with an
elegance of sign that, especially in Italy, only the greatest
possess. You will never encounter in this Concerto any useless
or rhetorical wandering of feeling; … this is a work
without one note too many, in which the polyphony is true
concomitance of intelligent lines».
My friend Danilo Dolci, with words of deep affection, defined
me «a man that has an intimate world that sings, that
wants to sing, in a land whose songs are extinguished, a
song that does not escape, acutely aware, that is to say
with the sense of the tragic and the comic, coherent but
open to the search for a new life».
I believe that this acute observation is also reflected
in two creative faces of mine; one spiritually and emotionally
suffering faced with the cruelty of living, to which I could
link “Threnody” for cello and orchestra (1989)
devoted to the young Chinese people that protested in Tien
An Men Square against the regime in Peking or “Waiting”
for piano, two horns, percussion and strings (1998) springing
from the spent hoping that a pardon would be granted to
the death row inmate Joseph O’Dell; on the other the
pleasure of the wink, of a thematic quotation, of irony.
In this other aspect I would certainly include the “Divertissement
de vieillesse” for flute, cello, piano and orchestra
(1992) that beginning from a Rossinian pretext gives light
vent to the composition technique of variation and contrapuntal
superimposition. Here I truly find a taste for and pleasure
in fun in music, and it is not by chance if the cycle of
my “A la manière de…” since 1980
has gone on uninterrupted through affectionate homage now
to Bach and Ravel, now to Shostakovich and Gershwin.
But among so much composing, what is perhaps closest to
my heart are the pages that I have devoted to the recorder,
an instrument that our century seems to have forgotten,
relegating it only to the first (and often the only) approach
to musical education in compulsory schooling; its timbre
has fascinated me, it has conquered me to the point that
I have wanted to try out its old tradition with new writing.
Thus there came “Sonata” (published by Schott)
and “Evolution 3” (published by Heinrichshofen’s
Verlag), both for contralto recorder and piano. As Giancarlo
Rostirolla wrote about “Evolution 3” (which
in 1974 I took up again for recorder and orchestra): «…in
this composition, among the few contemporary ones for the
recorder, one can find the stylistic peculiarities of Sollima:
solid writing and a very personal modern language in which
there hovers intimate poetry. Sollima is absolutely the
master of the phonic and technical possibilities of the
end-blown flute, which he entrusts with ‘evolutions’
extolling the oldest sonorities as well as the newest ones».
I would end here with a reflection: new? old? I believe
there must only be one term for music: valid.
I have tried.
Eliodoro Sollima
Sergio Albertini, Eliodoro Sollima. L’autobiografia
mai pubblicata, Il Mediterraneo, Palermo, 17 March 2000.
Danilo
Dolci: “Portrait” of Eliodoro Sollima
It is right to be hospitable and open to other people’s
values: but it is a waste not to fully valorise one’s
own.
Anyone can happen to meet him while he is walking with
short and rapid footsteps in the streets of Palermo, above
all between his house and the Conservatory. But I don’t
know how many people in Palermo realise that among them,
in the city, there lives one of the best musicians that
can be met today. It is not easy to realize it, slight
and bashful as he is, not at all anxious to climb on the
abundances of fashion.
The careful do not miss the fact that this man has an
intimate world that sings, wants to sing, in a land whose
songs are extinguished, also overpowered by the din of
commercial loudspeakers: a song that does not escape,
stringent but not dry, acutely aware – that is to
say with the sense of the tragic and the comic –
coherent but open.
While others around gain the favours of the powerful of
the moment by paying their respects to them and showily
adulating them – they will get their revenge afterwards
by tearing them to pieces in colloquies with their equals
– Elio Sollima still knows how to work in silence.
He began as a child to compose on the piano, when his
mother and his uncle did not play it. When he was twelve
his parents tried to find him a place to stay to study
(it was wartime, to go from his Marsala to Palermo, the
city of the Conservatory, you had to go through Trapani,
and from there, to stand for seven hours to get there),
but they did not find a boarding school, they had no relatives,
they did not know who to send him to, and they took him
back home.
He had no chance to meet a pianist, not a concert player
but at least one with a diploma. The radio for him was
an extraordinary source of knowledge, music never heard,
and enjoyment verging on suffering. At fourteen he was
able to begin to write the music that he had in himself.
At seventeen, the war over, he attended the Conservatory
in Palermo, but there was little time to study because
he had to earn money. The rest is better known: he completed
in just five years the courses in piano and composition,
perfected his piano playing with Guido Agosti and Benedetto
Michelangeli, had concert activity, and won composition
prizes. But he insisted on living out of the noise, he
wanted to be faithful to music, to his music.
When he improvised at the piano or the organ, it was like
a mountain watercourse – if anyone thinks I risk
being rhetorical, let them find the way to listen to it:
it is ancient and always new. In the young people that
went to him, he took care to avoid the need to compose
being fossilized by heaps of traditional rules. He encouraged
them to express themselves, to allow their own personalities
to grow, while they were becoming experts on the old rules
to be able to communicate in a more accomplished way,
in the subtlest way: every effect, every note, every movement,
every pause had to be exactly the ones desired. The world
of musical expression too was not a forced road where
everyone had to walk in the tracks of those who before
them had most impressed people by succeeding in forming
new ideal models that people – sooner or later –
recognized to be necessary, or making so much din as to
draw all the attention to oneself. Others’ researches
and inventions could not be ignored, one had to know them
in order to verify them and valorise them, but each person
had to live – and the musician, to make music –
according to his or her own intuitions, had to have the
courage to identify, to explore, to enlarge, and not only
for himself or herself, his or her own new world.
Besides, the person that thought about placing among the
works of art in a museum his own excrement in a glass
jar may have conceived something that was not second-hand,
but art is something else, certainly not a physiological
process nor an attempt at lucubration to impress people.
Analyzing his educational commitment, these appear to
be the essential components:
- deep experience-knowledge of musical expression;
- formation of an ample musical and diversified palette
so as to enrich in each person the possibilities of choice;
he did not try to impose himself on the trend, on other
people’s conviction: «the educator is a student
that has started to search even before the youngest student»;
- avoidance of the haughtiness of the Teacher –
he also knew how to joke, which does not remove seriousness
from the commitment but makes everyone feel at ease;
- musical exemplification that continually referred to
life, to daily practical experience, exploring the connection
among facts and expression: the house, the kitchen, the
street; for instance «the tailor is not good when
he sews a geometrically perfect suit but if he succeeds
in creating a suit that adjusting itself to a body expresses
it, harmonizing it - even if the suit, in itself, appears
defective»;
- individualized relationship, not starting from a text
or from a method prefabricated elsewhere; every person
has his or her own nucleus of experiences, also different
from other people’s, so that it is necessary to
talk a different language to each person: if the youth
has difficulty on a point, insisting on the need to perceive
the same fact from the most different perspectives, for
instance he improvised a bass to be harmonized to help
the student overcome that difficulty: «even if I
myself had written the book, a beautiful book, I would
not recommend it to you, except as a supplement»;
- invitation and guide to analysis: «in order to
build well it is necessary to know the building material;
in order to compose well it is necessary to know how to
decompose, to reduce a piece of music to its essential
structure, to anatomize it observing it as in an X-ray:
this capacity for dismantlement – necessary to the
performer if he or she wants to understand the weight
of every sound – is essential to the composer».
Danilo Dolci, Chissà se i pesci piangono, Einaudi,
Turin 1973.
The compositions of Eliodoro Sollima condemning
violence
In remembering my father I wish to focus on a particular
aspect of his production, that is to say the one linked
to the composition of some pieces whose common denominator
is condemnation of violence, an aspect to which explicit
reference is made in tonight’s programme by the
orchestral piece entitled “Waiting”, but to
which, though indirectly (I will explain afterwards),
we can also link the Ode to Saint Cecilia for children’s
choir and two pianos which was performed at the beginning
of the evening by the Children’s Choir of the V.
Bellini Conservatory conducted by Antonio Sottile.
As an authentic Christian, animated by a really sincere
and deep faith (as those who knew him well will remember),
my father always believed in a non-violent ideal of life
and, as a composer, he wanted on some occasions to manifest
his condemnation of events that bore witness to a culture
of violence and death.
In the catalogue of my father’s compositions –
a rather big catalogue, comprising around 200 works covering
a period of over fifty years – there are indeed
some pieces that, though not numerous in relation to the
massive structure of the whole production and written
at long intervals of time from one another, represent
some particularly significant moments in his career as
a composer, as an expression of the same sense of anguish
and suffering that, firstly as a man, he felt inside himself
faced with such a tragic event as the death of a human
being provoked by another. This anguish, each time, my
father fixed on the stave with a different stylistic code,
corresponding to the particular moment in the evolution
of his language but every time with the same intensity
and, above all, without useless rhetoric, with that sobriety
of expression that was always a distinctive feature of
his language, and that in the specificity of the pieces
I want to refer to derives precisely from the fact that
the feelings that he wanted to express were not mere external
demonstration, exploitation of a tragic event, but came
from the depths of his soul.
It must also be considered that my father lived in a world
of his own, that of music, a world which, I have to say,
the voices of the mass-media rather sporadically succeeded
in breaking into. However, when this happened and a strong
stimulus penetrated into this world of his, then his sensibility
was deeply shaken and he felt with powerful urgency the
need to translate into music what he felt. As Roberto
Pagano has acutely observed, the Three moments of the
passion on Golgotha for baritone and orchestra, composed
in 1965 but performed for the first time at Monreale during
a Week of Sacred Music, can be considered, retrospectively,
as the first of the works in which my father expressed
his condemnation of the violence in the world; with this
piece, R. Pagano says, «Eliodoro Sollima intended
to condemn the most overwhelming crime that history remembers».
From 1968, instead, there dates the composition of the
Concert for strings that my father wrote when he was struck
by the news of the assassination of Bob Kennedy, to whose
memory the piece is dedicated. Speaking of this concert,
Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi was to write: «Sollima commemorates
Kennedy with peaceful lyricism, with sobriety and elegance
of sign that, in Italy, only the greatest possess. You
will never encounter in this Concerto any useless or rhetorical
wandering of feeling. This is a work without one note
too many, in which the polyphony is true concomitance
of intelligent lines».
In the language the Concerto for strings reflects the
researches on sound that in those years my father was
carrying out with the cycle of the Evolutions, but this
desire for the “new” is never translated into
a position of refusal a priori of the tradition as such.
Lanza Tomasi, again in the critique referring to the performance
of this Concerto, observed: «Today you just have
to manifest the desire to be an artist to be able to get
by just with the novelty of your ideas. Sollima has preferred
another road, that is to say seeking exact and noble solutions
to old problems, and has the rare merit of knowing how
to find Ariadne’s thread in the Babel of languages».
About twenty years later, in 1989, another bloody event,
the slaughter in Tien An Men Square, deeply shocked my
father, and this led to Threnody for cello and orchestra,
a composition that, as he himself declared, «is
rich in contrasts because it expresses at the same time
feelings of horror, of execration, of pity and of tenderness».
Stylistically Threnody too, like the Concerto in memory
of Kennedy, can be placed in that phase of my father’s
composition in which he chose to adopt procedures of an
experimental type referable to the series of the Evolutions,
but in this case further filtered.
In 1996 there came the diptych of Cantatas, one lay and
the other sacred; in this case there is not a specific
event that can be identified as the direct and immediate
matrix of this composition, but it is symbolically all
the crimes committed by the mafia that are harshly condemned.
In the diptych two opposite logics are placed side by
side: the logic of violence and revenge in the lay cantata,
that of love and forgiveness in the sacred cantata.
In this connection I wish to quote the reflections from
which this diptych sprang, reflections that my father
annotated in an old notebook and that for this reason
I am able to quote: «After 2000 years of history,
humanity, though living among overwhelming technological
conquests, though cultivating the most ambitious aspirations
for an advanced and civil existence, discovers a bleak
and desolate picture. To the progress of the machine there
corresponds the regress of man. There is enough for a
deep and responsible reflection on the need to entrust
to healthy and correct thought, and not to the force of
instinct, the origin of every action of ours, in civil
respect for the laws that regulate the life of man and
nature. Protagonists of the diptych Year 2000 - Year 0:
man, the king of hatred and violence; Jesus, the king
of love and forgiveness».
The lay cantata, on a dialect text, has a subtitle that
says: “Ccu ‘ntra di voi ha fatto cchiu delitti”.
The fact is that anyone who judges indicates in the record
of criminality the right to the priority of killing, a
priority that is determined in virtue of a crime curriculum
judged incomparable. So at the moment when the mafia boss
gives an order to shoot to the man who, among all his
men, can boast of this awful record, all move into action
at the same time.
In the sacred cantata, on a Latin text from the Gospel
according to St. John, the sentence that acts as a subtitle
is: “Qui sine peccato est vestrum”. The accusers
in this case are immediately ready to make an examination
of conscience and, in the awareness of their own guilt,
none of them feels they have the right to stone the adulteress.
The two Cantatas were first performed in July 1996, conducted
by my father, at Marsala Cathedral on the occasion of
the 4th anniversary of the killing of judge Paolo Borsellino,
while the first Palermo performance came in 1997 at the
San Saverio church, conducted by Carmelo Caruso; and it
was again Maestro Caruso that in 1998, with the F. Ferrara
Orchestra, conducted the absolute première of “Waiting”
at the San Francesco d’Assisi church. This work
was composed by my father in 1997, in the long days that
preceded the execution of Joseph O’Dell, who today,
through a strange design of destiny, is buried a stone’s
throw from my father, in the same cemetery at Santa Maria
di Gesù.
There is a significant coincidence that tonight links
the performance of Waiting and that of the Ode to St.
Cecilia performed at the start of this event. The fact
is that the composition of these two works, though so
different from one another and apparently unconnected,
occurred simultaneously, as my father himself explains
in an interview, from which I will quote what he himself
says in this connection: «Waiting came into being
while I was writing a passage for the mass to St. Cecilia
that was to be sung by a choir of children; an auroral,
angelic piece, with great freshness. And assisting at
the continual postponements of the execution of O’Dell,
while I was trying to compose, some sentences came out
of me, some brief thoughts full of great sadness, of anguish.
I noted them down in a notebook and continually deleted
them, dissatisfied. Then I realized why the music was
coming out of me so anguishing: I was really writing a
piece for O’Dell. I put together all this material
and this gave rise to a passage that symbolically I entitled
Waiting, in memory of those days during which not even
the Pope had succeeded in stopping the execution. I noted
down on the score: Knowing the day and the time of your
own death is a privilege reserved for those who are sentenced
to death. Waiting, in addition to wanting to express a
harsh condemnation for a law that dishonours civil society
that accepts it, also wants to involve the listener in
empathy with a tremendous state of mind in which despair,
anguish and perhaps also acceptance are confused in a
tumultuous rush of thoughts, feelings and memories struggling
with the inexorable running out of time. In the dynamic
contrast, rhythmic, harmonic and timbric, the music sets
out to evoke the convulsive sequence of images, memories
and emotions that torment the last hours of life of the
condemned man, to stop suddenly on an unfinished bar,
in harmony with a heart that stops beating…
In memory of Joseph O’Dell and how many others?».
Anna Maria Sollima
A talk by Anna Maria Sollima on the occasion of the conferment
of the Maestro Prize on the memory of her father, on 10
May 2003.
PREMIO
MAESTRO 2002
SALVATORE CICERO (Cefalù
1940, Cefalù 1982)
Salvatore
Cicero was born in Cefalù on 11 August 1940. At the
age of five he began to study violin, and he took his diploma
at the Vincenzo Bellini Conservatory in Palermo with Guido
Ferrari, subsequently perfecting his skills with Remy Principe.
In 1959 with “Collegium Musicum Helveticum”
he did two prestigious tours in South America, the United
States, Canada, Cuba and some of the biggest European cities.
In 1960 he won a competition to become a section violinist
at the Scala Opera House. He spent a year in Milan, and
then in Venice he won the competition as the other first
violinist at the Fenice Theatre.
In 1963 he decided to return to Sicily and from that year
until his death, with a brief phase at the Teatro Massimo,
he was the leading violinist of the Sicilian Symphony Orchestra,
winning the competition held in 1964. In May 1963, on the
occasion of a fascinating performance at Monreale Cathedral
of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis with the Sicilian Symphony
Orchestra and the choir of the Sainte Edwige Cathedral in
Berlin conducted by Hermann Scherchen, Roberto Pagano wrote
in the «Giornale di Sicilia»: «we greet
with affectionate joy the advent of a young man whose talent
has no secrets for us in the very demanding role of first
violinist with the great Sicilian orchestra. Salvatore Cicero…
has been round the world in a restless search for those
successes and those incontestable qualifications that allow
him to come back to his country today with an authority
that his young age might threaten to deny him. His solo
performance, the most important one that can insidiously
be presented to the ‘concertmaster’ of an orchestra,
has aroused the enthusiasm of Scherchen». With the
Sicilian Symphony Orchestra he participated as a soloist
in numerous concerts in Italy and abroad under the most
important conductors – including Strass, Albert, Sebastian,
Chelibidache, Zecchi, Ziino, Ceccato and Ferro – and
also took part in important events like the International
Week of New Music and the Days of Baroque Music in Palermo,
the Festival of the Two Worlds in Spoleto, the Venice Biennial
and the Bach Festival in Oxford.
In 1972 with the violinist Henrik Szering he played the
Concerto op. 3 no. 8 by Vivaldi for two violins and orchestra.
Lastly, in May 1982 he did the first performance of the
Concerto for violin and orchestra that Ottavio Ziino dedicated
to him and that was «conceived in relation to his
qualities as a performer».
From 1964 he was a violin teacher at the Vincenzo Bellini
Conservatory in Palermo.
In 1964 with the pianist (and composer) Eliodoro Sollima
and the violoncellist Giovanni Perriera he also created
the Palermo Trio, which played for the most important Italian
concert societies, and in 1969, together with Michele Campanella
and Riccardo Muti, he won the national “Golden Diapason”
prize for music. In February 1966 in the newspaper «L’Ora»,
after the performance of the Triple Concert by Beethoven
with the Sicilian Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ottavio
Ziino for Amici della Musica, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi wrote:
«one has to stress the performance by Salvatore Cicero,
personalized by a violin sound of exceptional quality for
sweetness and lyricism, and this also goes for the boldness
of the bow, giving the impression of a mature soloist able
to play around with his instrument».
In 1972 with the Siena pianist Pier Narcissus Masi he created
the Cicero Masi duo, which in 1974 took part in Rome in
an important festival of concertos on Mozart’s Chamber
Music. In «L’Unità» of 15 February
1974 we read: «we can even see a teacher of style
and composure in the young violinist from Cefalù
Salvatore Cicero, with a clear, intense and perfectly balanced
sound».
In 1972 he also created “Giovani Cameristi Siciliani”,
a string orchestra formed by very young students at the
Palermo Conservatory. The violinists were all students of
his own, whom he conducted and guided in intense concert
activity especially in schools. The initiative, among the
first ones in Italy, was enormous successful and received
significant consensuses from the public and critics. «Taking
to young people music performed by young people» was
the main aim of this group. «This encounter should
be decisive for those who listen, school being a nursery
to form the public of tomorrow, and for the young people
that make music, who from this experience will receive a
completion of their artistic training and an impulse to
always achieve something new and important» (from
a January 1973 concert programme). With the Giovani Cameristi
he participated in 1976 in the Passau European Festival,
in what was previously Federal Germany; in July of the following
year in Austria in the International Festival “Jugend
and Musik in Wien”; and in 1980 he did a tour of North
Germany (with concerts in Bremen and Hamburg).
In the summer of 1982 the Teatro Lirico in Milan guested
the International Festival of Youth Orchestras. It was also
to be the prestigious venue of the last performance by the
Giovani Cameristi conducted by their founder. Feral Schroeder
(the pseudonym of Alessandro Ferrero), a Milanese music
critic, wrote as follows after assisting at the rehearsal
before the evening concert: «I have seen Salvatore
Cicero coordinating the young generations of his land, stimulating
them, driving them towards a coherent interpretation, dominating
them from the height of his knowledge and goading them towards
professional seriousness worthy of the truest of musicians.
I have seen him proudly rejoicing in Sicilian boldness because
of the awareness of the values that represented all his
work. In a programme fraught with traps I saw him confidently
controlling the quality of the sound».
He died suddenly on 3 August of the same year.
Since his death there have been numerous initiatives intended
to remember this musician and educator: in 1982, also following
a collection of signatures by town councils and exponents
of the cultural and artistic world, Cefalù Council
decided to name the nineteenth-century theatre in the town
after Salvatore Cicero; in 1985 the Cefalù Amici
della Musica association, founded way back in 1964 by Ms
Pepita Misuraca, was also dedicated to the memory of Salvatore
Cicero; in 1988, at the initiative of Luigi Rocca, a student
of Cicero’s, the Salvatore Cicero String Orchestra
was founded, made up young musicians at the Conservatory;
and in 2000 the Vincenzo Bellini Conservatory dedicated
to Salvatore Cicero one of its most prestigious lecture
rooms.
Sober but impassioned, concerned to express the different
inspiration of each composer and each piece with always
implicit technical abilities, Salvatore Cicero sometimes
played as no violinist, even the most famous, are able to
play. Yet – or indeed, precisely for this reason –
he was humble. It was not enough for him to cultivate every
day the intuition that illuminates as in a flash of lightning;
he was sorry not to know everything.
At the age of four he already studied violin, among flying
shavings and hammer blows near the carpenter’s bench
of his father, with a violinist that in the evening, in
the shop itself, also taught guitar and mandolin. His father
– he was orphaned at three, and had had to go to work
early – listened passionately to works on the parish
radio, and tried to learn the notes so as to help him as
best he could.
At nine, having enrolled at the Palermo Conservatory, he
set out at half past five twice a week on the steam train
– it stopped at every station, and at Fiumetorto people
got out to play football for half an hour while waiting
for the connection – and he returned home towards
the evening: on the train his fellow travellers wanted to
hear him; he brought a few sandwiches from house and saved
the little money added to buy books. After two years he
was offered a scholarship in Rome but his mother did not
want to separate from him. He studied as he could until
he was eight, he had no records, but the poverty of the
environment made him want to succeed at all costs –
even if then the consideration of the people was mainly
«violin teacher, poor and scanty…» –
when a Swiss conductor passing through noticed him and offered
him a chance to participate in a concert tour with a chamber
orchestra. Relations with instrumentalists of different
schools, rehearsals done in concentration, each person studied
his part in his room, seriousness and punctuality that he
had not yet encountered, careful to avoid even a chair creaking,
a broader vision of the world: Switzerland, Argentina, Uruguay,
Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, the United
States, and later Spain, Portugal, France, Germany and Austria.
At the beginning his expertise was limited, but then sometimes
he played solo.
Returning to Palermo was a shock. He could not and would
not adapt to the unpunctuality and the confusion. He read
a lot of music, and took his diploma almost self-taught.
At a course in Venice, meeting a teacher like Principe,
who proposed that he should arrange to study with him for
two years, he began to think again about what his own preparation
should be. But he needed to earn. He participated in a competition
at the Scala without recommendations and conviction. He
won it. Aged twenty. Palpitations, enormous excitement at
playing with the greatest conductors, thinking about everything
before so as not to forget the least details – Minetti,
the first violin, arrived an hour before – and plenty
of serious discussions: and playing at the Scala was a visiting
card, a social affirmation. He studied eight, nine, sometimes
ten hours a day: no blisters formed on his fingertips, and
so his fingers bled instead.
He had to go to Palermo to do his military service. He played
as the other first violinist at the Massimo, then when the
Symphony Orchestra had no first violin they called on him
and, winning the national competition, from the age of twenty-one
he was the “concertmaster” of the orchestra.
He thought it was only then that he learnt to study: one
hour was worth ten to him, and he deeply regretted not having
been able to study those two years with Principe. He prepared
himself with commitment and gusto, and acquired experience
– in chamber music too, above all with Sollima and
Perriera – but though very young, he found the time
to devote himself intensely to educational work.
If a young person played a bad note and tended to correct
it, he let him continue; he stopped him and made him repeat
if he realized that the inaccuracy had not been noticed.
Exactness was not so much a formal fact to him as a matter
of moral principle.
When, seeing particular difficulties, he took the student’s
violin, his attitude was not «I’ll show you
how it’s done». Trying the piece, he blended
experiencing other’s difficulty with that instrument
with exposition of his own solution: he might discover a
defect of the violin or the bow and at the same time thing
show what that violin and that bow could express.
He repeated to the young people that studied with him: «I
recommend you get organised like that but you have to find
yourself more and more in a loose position, the organization
that is most exactly effective. If you make a mistake, try
to understand why you made a mistake: if you do well, try
to understand why you do well. Only you can penetrate the
problems that face you, just as you can become loose and
balanced». «Learn to listen to yourself and
to listen to others». «Becoming a musician is
also a process of moving from vagueness to exactness».
«Loosen up, learn to play while walking too».
«Concentrate, control yourself, guide yourself: then
all your life will be felt in your music, if you sleep a
few hours, what you do and how you do it. An artist has
to know how to control himself and to concentrate like –
and more than – an athlete».
He believed in group work, in playing together, and himself
with the others: for young people, playing with an artist
like him meant assisting at a transfiguration of his or
her own abilities, and the awareness of this imposed on
each person a higher level of responsibility. His formation
as an educator essentially developed from realizing he had
been wrong in studying. Of having underestimated as a boy
a certain type of technical preparation. I will not be surprised
if in the next years Salvatore Cicero will help to bring
to fruition in Sicily, with qualified international collaborations,
one of the most important music schools in the world.
PREMIO
MAESTRO 2001
GIOVANNI PERRIERA (Palermo, 1923-1988)
Regarding
the extraordinary fascination that the sound of the cello
has long exerted on me, because of that timbre quality it
has that makes the voice of this instrument so “human”,
a decisive role was undoubtedly played by the fact that,
already when I was very young, I had the opportunity to
hear it played by a sensitive and impassioned performer,
Giovanni Perriera; the fact is that my personal memory of
this teacher has distant roots, in the world of my infancy,
when my father and Giovanni Perriera formed the Duo (which
later became the Trio, beginning from 1964, when they were
joined by Salvatore Cicero). The rehearsals of the Duo (and
subsequently those of the Trio) generally took place at
our house, in the presence of a rather particular audience:
my brother Giovanni (a future student of teacher Perriera)
sitting in his high chair, literally subjugated by music,
my sister Donatella, who listened in hiding behind the door
because she was terrified by the presence, in the room,
of an anxious black outline (the rigid sheath of the cello),
while I, a more reckless person, sat in front of teacher
Perriera, spellbound perhaps not so much by the music as
by the spectacle of the extraordinary mimicry of his face,
on which one was literally able “to read” what
he was playing.
The impassioned élan with which Giovanni Perriera
played his instrument was truly overwhelming, able to attract
into the magic circle of music even the most absentminded
or indifferent listener. No less overwhelming was the charge
of vitality that emanated from his person; anyone who met
him will remember his sincere character, his agile body,
the live and penetrating look above the thick beard, and
above all the intense heat with which he discussed matters
that impassioned him, gesticulating and often using vivacious
and colourful expressions. He was undoubtedly a character
that struck and fascinated one.
He had approached the cello when he was a child, undertaking
the study of it under the guidance of a maternal uncle,
Giuseppe Caminiti, at that time the first cellist at the
Massimo; in the meantime, however, he also had to study
to be an accountant because, he said, «in my family
they were all postal, telegraph and telephone workers and
my father was not convinced that one could live with music
alone». (1) Still very young, in 1942 he had had orchestra
experience with an ensemble of young instrumentalists involved
in a series of concerts in Germany; returning to Sicily
he had begun his long and tireless career as a teacher (first
at the conservatory in Messina and then at the Palermo one),
at the same time having long and intense concert activity,
not only as first cello both of the Sicilian Symphony Orchestra
(from 1958 to 1973) and of the orchestra of the Teatro Massimo
(beginning from 1974), but also through intense participation
in various chamber groups. In this connection I want to
mention, in addition to the Sollima-Perriera Duo and the
Palermo Trio (which in 1968 was given the “Golden
Diapason” prize for chamber music), the Anderson-Perriera
Duo (flute and violoncello), the Perriera-Grillo Duo (violoncello
and piano), the Perriera-Patera Duo (violoncello and clavicembalo),
and above all the Mercadante Quartet, an unusual chamber
ensemble in that it was made up of four cellos, created
in 1977 at the initiative of Giovanni Perriera, with the
precise aim of recovering original music written for this
rare ensemble.
The Mercadante Quartet (formed by Perriera himself, as well
as Marcello Insinna, Rosalba Bigoni and Giovanni Sollima)
held various concerts (including some for RAI) and also
made a record.
As a soloist Perriera had played under prestigious conductors
like Celibidache, Albert, Bloomfield, Machado and Ziino;
his impetuous and impassioned temperament made him a particularly
suitable interpreter of the romantic and late romantic repertoire;
he himself among his solo experiences loved to remember
those linked to the performance of Dvorak’s Concerto,
and above all Strauss’s “Don Quixote”,
which he considered his pièce de résistance:
«playing I become Don Quixote myself. Once I empathized
to the point of ending with tears in my eyes». (2)
But he was capable of moderating that impassioned élan,
without his performance losing warmth, when he approached
Bach: on various occasions he performed with refined sensibility
the latter’s Suites for solo cello as well as the
sonatas originally written for viola da gamba. In this connection
I will quote a critique of 1971: «The three sonatas
for cello and cembalo concertante by J. S. Bach found in
G. Perriera a sensitive interpreter; his sweet and incisive
expressiveness, the warm and mellow sound and the intimate
humility with which he approached the musical text moved
the public». (3)
He was not entirely hostile to the contemporary repertoire;
his natural disposition to the beauty and purity of sound
led him to be highly polemic towards the so-called “experimental”
composers, whom he accused of doing violence to the instruments.
In this connection, I am happy to quote some red-hot declarations
he made during an interview-debate arising precisely from
a letter that Giovanni Perriera had addressed to the daily
paper «L’Ora» in defence of conductors,
publicly accused by G. Gelmetti of “dull obstructionism”
towards contemporary music (in Palermo Gelmetti had just
conducted a cycle of contemporary compositions with the
Sicilian Symphony Orchestra): «I don’t understand
how conductors of traditional symphonic orchestras expect
(with the aid of some signs of Martian fantasy) to have
the piano attacked with elbow blows (in the best of cases),
and string instruments to be beaten to produce horrible
distorted sounds (again in the best of cases); to have people
blowing raspberries into the small instruments and the brasses;
all this with a big din – or not! - of struck cans,
waving trifles, scraping and licking of instruments. …
I don’t see why people should not exploit the new
electronic instruments (which are also very beautiful from
all points of view), instead of ridiculing a symphony orchestra.
… I refuse, I REFUSE, to strike my cello; they cannot
ask me to do this, it would be like asking me to strike
my brother!». (4)
In addition to being an excellent performer, Giovanni Perriera
was also an extraordinary teacher, endowed with a rare communicative
ability in the relationship with students; from his school
there emerged valid musicians (Giorgio Gasbarro, Salvatore
Pusateri, Giovanni Sollima, Carmelo Nicotra to quote only
a few of them) that still today, after so many years, vividly
remember his teachings.
Danilo Dolci thus describes Perriera as a teacher: «Smilingly
aggressive, he gives no truce to the young person, every
meeting is almost a fight, I would not be surprised if her
emerged exhausted from it: … I have seen boys let
him say things to them that they certainly had not tolerated
from anyone, and not only regarding the cello. They feel
trust in this person, who each time leaves them more capable,
more concentrated and coordinated, breathing better than
before, almost like a yoga teacher.
He asks for clarity, beauty of sound and phrasing right
from the first year. He tries to understand and to be understood.
… The student will have to possess those means that
he can assimilate from the tradition, from culture, from
technique, but above all he has to be able to become spontaneous,
otherwise he will be very good but he will not succeed in
communicating anything human. Great love is necessary for
overcoming hard hands, the wood of the instrument, the incorporated
hardness, and succeeding in conquering oneself with expression:
and in communicating with others. Anyone who falls in love
can go a long way». (5)
And it is again with words by D. Dolci that I want to end
this brief recollection of Giovanni Perriera: «He
doesn’t look for the ‘good one’; hearing
people say ‘how beautiful this music is’ is
his greatest joy». (6)
Anna Maria Sollima
Notes
(1) R. Alajmo, Ritratto di violoncellista, Interview with
G. Perriera in «Cronache», 15 June 1985.
(2) Ibidem.
(3) Review of a concert done by G. Perriera and S. Patera
at the library of the Vincenzo Bellini Conservatory in
Palermo (1971).
(4) F. Carli, Io non lecco il violoncello, Interview-debate
published in the newspaper «L’Ora» of
13 November 1980.
(5) D. Dolci, Chissà se i pesci piangono, Einaudi,
Turin 1973, pp. 200-201.
(6) Ibidem.
PREMIO
MAESTRO 2000
LIVIA GIACCHINO PAUNITA
She
was born in 1910 in a family of musicians, the youngest
member. From the very first years she revealed a special
musical talent; endowed with absolute pitch, at the age
of just four she tried her hand at the piano on the Etudes
and Little sonatas of the 1st course performed by her sister
Toni, who was two years older.
Her eldest sister Maria Giacchino Cusenza, whose first pupil
she was and with whom she completed her piano studies, gave
her her first lessons at the age of five.
Of her first years at the piano Livia Giacchino Paunita
often liked to remember the difficulties she met because
of her small and weak “hand not suited to the piano”,
as she defined it, which only patient and careful study
allowed her to overcome. It was perhaps this juvenile experience,
certainly also linked to other later ones, that led her
when she was an adult and became a teacher to persevere
with tenacity and to give the best of herself with all her
students, independently of their gifts, convinced that the
value of a piano “school” is not to be measured
only from the results obtained by the best students, but
above all from the quality levels that it is able to allow
all the students to reach. This intuition, which can be
considered absolutely modern, is one of the salient features
of her personality as a teacher.
She took her diploma at 16, having passed at 13 the 7th-year
examination, more or less corresponding to the present examination
of middle achievement (8th year). Her repertoire at this
point was already very rich, ranging from the works of Bach,
which in her teaching activity were to be a milestone, to
Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt. And in this period she also
went deeper into early 20th-century composers: Debussy,
Albeniz, Ravel, Casella and Castelnuovo-Tedesco.
Of course, in the fervour of all these studies, because
of the family milieu in which she found herself living,
there was also intense and constant chamber and concert
activity that were to accompany her almost all through her
career. Her first experiences date from when she was nine,
both as a soloist and in a duo with the violinist Sistina
Lo Iacono, with whom she was also to continue playing for
many years as an adult. And then she played in a duo with
her cellist sister Toni, in a trio, a 4-hand piano duo with
two pianos, with her sister Maria Giacchino. Among her memories
of this rich chamber activity there is the first Palermo
performance of the Sonata by Paul Hindemith for viola and
piano with Aurelio Arcidiacono, to whom the composer dedicated
the work and who was also a musician of merit that entered
the Giacchino family as Toni’s husband.
As she herself often emphasised, chamber music had a major
role in her artistic maturation. Precisely for this reason,
in her activity as a teacher, she always paid particular
attention to it, exhorting and stimulating the students
to play in chamber ensembles, when she was not herself the
promoter of music groups. The fact is she did not see chamber
activity as the fallback of failed soloists but one of the
highest expressions of musical art, a fundamental stage
in the growth and expressive maturation of every good pianist.
A teacher at the teacher’s training college and subsequently
at the Vincenzo Bellini Conservatory in Palermo, with her
sister Toni – a cellist, but involved in teaching
Choral Song at middle and senior secondary schools –
she wrote a treatise for that specific kind of teaching.
At this point in her career Livia Giacchino Paunita had
already had numerous high-level students and was to have
many others and to take them to the diploma in the future
(perhaps even she herself could not have said how many there
were) and with more than satisfactory results: many of them
are today much appreciated teachers at the Conservatory
and successful musicians.
A rigorous and demanding teacher – but also an affectionate
and understanding one – she expected work of continuous
exploration of technique and interpretation; at the same
time she encouraged and supported students so as to allow
them to discover the true essence of every composer and
every single note. She was an illuminating, strong but very
sweet guide that stimulated a continual search for internal
expressive intensity in respect for extreme stylistic rigor.
Her teaching commitment never stopped towards her students
and their students, and she continued to follow them with
interest and enthusiasm, always keeping alive the memory
of the teachings of her sister Maria, also a great teacher,
concert performer and composer.
During the years of her long and important presence at the
Conservatory she had indeed the opportunity to personalize
the teaching method worked out by her sister, making it
an instrument constantly aiming at the “expressive
rendition” of composers, though without annulling
the personality of the performer.
Continually interested in the new things that music offers
as it evolves, curious always to listen to the numerous
talents that alternated on the concert stage, «not
wanting to remain at all costs anchored to old performing
archetypes» – as she was wont to repeat –
she was always desirous of further renewals and explorations.
The same great curiosity was not only related to the “new”:
she was also always interested in old editions of the classics,
so as to make comparisons. It was thus that she succeeded
in digging out the first and only edition of the 12 etudes
op. 1 by Liszt, which were unknown; she immediately undertook
a revision of these, published by the Curci company in 1976.
And every discovery (or rediscovery) she immediately made
known to the students closest to her; we could affirm that
her all-round love for music directly grew in proportion
to her age, lucidly, until the end.
Among her numerous publications we can mention: I bimbi
al piano (Children at the piano) published by Carisch, an
imposing teaching work devoted to students taking the first
steps in the world of the piano; and Educazione musicale,
Petrini, Turin 1980.
In 2000 she was awarded the Maestro Prize for her career
with the following motivation: Livia Giacchino Paunita is
a rare example of unconditional passion for music and of
devotion to teaching, in the broadest sense, of formation
of the musical personalities of students and not of mere
transmission of technical knowledge.
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