August 05, 2019
Asiagofestival 2019.
Stringed instruments are the real stars of this 53rd edition of the festival, which will return to enliven the center of Asiago with unprecedented and multifaceted programming.
From August 6 to 18, 2019, theAsiagoFestival will return to enliven the center of Asiago with new and multifaceted programming again this year. Now in its 53rd year, the Festival was born thanks to Fiorella Benetti Brazzale as a major event focused on organ and sacred music. Throughout its history, the festival has broadened its horizons, opening up to contemporary music and hosting extremely varied ensembles, yet never denying its original matrix.
Therefore, opening the 2019 Festival will be Gabriel Faurè’s Messa da Requiem, with the City of Thiene Choir and Officina Armonica conducted by Luigi Ceola (Aug. 6, 9 p.m., St. Matthew’s Cathedral). It might seem grotesque to open a Festival with a funeral mass, except that this Requiem has nothing to do with the dramatic mood that pervades this genre in the production of composers such as Mozart, Berlioz, and Verdi, but rather is tinged with nostalgic and suspended tones. It is Fauré’s own words that help us understand why this choice was made: “It has been said of this Requiem that it does not express the fear of death, some have called it a lullaby of death. But that is how I feel death: as a happy release, an aspiration for happiness beyond, rather than a painful transition.” An aspiration of happiness, then, that brings us into the all-chamber heart of this Festival.
The real stars of this edition are string instruments, which the audience will be able to get to know closely by savoring their sounds in concert programs that are very different, and therefore complementary, to each other. The soloists of the Teatro alla Scala (Thursday, Aug. 8, 9 p.m., Millepini Theater), will form a string sextet that will take us on a journey through some of the most extraordinary pages of early 20th-century Central European chamber music. Indeed, pieces will be presented by composers with troubled lives, constantly searching both for inner stability-including through continuous musical reference to their origins-and for a world in which they could live and express themselves. Sextets will be performed by Martinu, a naturalized U.S. Bohemian, Korngold (whose Austrian suggestions sound decidedly more familiar to us) a Moravian who also emigrated to America because of his Jewish origins, and the equally Bohemian Schulhoff who, on the other hand, never managed to escape from the Wülzburg concentration camp.
On Sunday, Aug. 11, at 9 p.m., at the Millepini Theater, the sextet will be enriched with other instrumentalists and thus form an even larger ensemble, eventually making up a string octet. Two seemingly distant compositions-written in 1825 and 1925, exactly a century apart-will be juxtaposed in the concert, yet they show a subtle connection in terms of the neoclassical cleanliness of the counterpoint, the linearity of the voices, and the occasional reference to the great Father of Music: Johann Sebastian Bach. Mendelssohn and Shostakovich, then, interspersed with a plunge into the contemporary with Zimmermann’s solo cello sonata, a great virtuoso piece from 1960 that highlights the full technical and timbral potential of the instrument, taking us into an acoustic universe on the edge of sonorities belonging to electronic music. The concert falls within the project l ‘”Chamber Music Workshop,” which has been enthralling the Asiago audience for several years now with the aim of creating a musical forge in which friends of different generations, experiences and backgrounds come together in Asiago with the desire to festively explore together some of the most beautiful pages of chamber music of all time.
The Polish Cello Quartet (Tuesday, Aug. 13, 9 p.m., Millepini Theater), a quartet made up of young and talented Polish cellists, will present a program focusing on Polish and Belgian composers that we are rarely lucky enough to hear in Italy. After a small tribute to our country with the tasty “on vacation” by Italian cellist and composer Carlo Alfredo Piatti, we will hear music by De Jong, Wilkomirski, Moulert and Tansman, ranging from crisp, light-hearted sonorities to bolder experiments.
The two appointments that follow, in completely different ways, will make the audience experience the thrill of witnessing truly unique and unprecedented events, in that listening dimension that audiences of all ages have experienced when confronted with compositions that have become timeless classics today. In fact, the tribute to guest composer Artur Zagajewski (Wednesday, Aug. 14, 9 p.m., Millepini Theater) will see the Cellopassionato Ensemble, an irreplaceable presence at the Festival, engaged in a program consisting of a number of contemporary pieces (for ensembles of up to nine cellos together) but especially the world premiere of a piece that the Festival specially commissioned from M. Zagajewski, the evening’s special guest. Over the next evening (Thursday, Aug. 15, 9 p.m., St. Matthew’s Cathedral) Maria Dal Bianco will conduct the Coenobium Vocale, accompanied by a Renaissance instrumental ensemble, in some choral compositions from 16th- and 17th-century Venice.
One of the additional boasts of this Festival is that it organically integrates performers of high caliber and experience with young instrumentalists, never sacrificing professionalism and care in performance and, indeed, setting them as a definite goal of growth for the young people involved. Such is the case with the staging of Purcell’s “Fairy Queen” (Saturday, Aug. 17, 5 p.m. at Camporovere’s Forte Interrotto), in which Sergio Gasparella will conduct the “Crescere in musica” orchestra formed by young students from Thiene schools. A tasty semi-opera, in which Purcell, with extraordinary dramaturgical virtuosity, intersperses effervescent musical moments with the recitation of William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Lionel Avot will be the protagonist of the last concert, which, dedicated to the organ, (Sunday, Aug. 18, 9 p.m., St. Matthew’s Cathedral) will vigorously take us back to the full sacredness that has characterized the Festival since its first edition. Indeed, on the program we find some of the most important composers, ancient and contemporary, who have devoted themselves to sacred music with fervent dedication: Bach, Liszt, Leguay, Messiaen and Duruflé. Claudio Pasceri’s cello will make the evening’s timbre even more interesting with a special foray into the program with Messiaen’s “Louange a l’Eternité de Jésus.”
AsiagoFestival 2019 thus connotes itself as a great musical feast, in which the greats of the past mingle with contemporary composers, young performers meet the more experienced, the typical voice of the choir and opera frames the pure chamber music concerts, thanks to the strong imprint of Julius Berger, Claudio Pasceri and Alberto Brazzale, artistic and organizational directors. Each concert has free admission-thanks in part to the support of the Municipality of Asiago, St. Matthew Parish and Gran Moravia, Alpilatte-Alpine Butter-and will be introduced by a short presentation to take the audience on each of these short but intense musical journeys.
Info:
0424.464081 Tourist Office Municipality of Asiago
www.asiagofestival.it
Press info:
Alexander Tommasi
+39 339 2938824
tommasialessandro93@gmail.com