Museo Nazionale del Bargello - Florence (via del Proconsolo 4)

Mercoledì 30 luglio ore 21.15 Elliott Carter — miniature da camera

Fragment per quartetto d'archi | 1994 Waley-Cohen | Righele | Rassekhi | Ricciardi

Francesco Petrarca - Italo Dall'Orto

Scrivo in Vento per flauto | 1991 Marasco

Riconoscenza per G. Petrassi per violino | 1984 Semchuk

Walt Whitman* - Italo Dall'Orto

Warble for Lilac-Time per soprano e pianoforte | 1943 Peri | Nardi

Italo Calvino - Italo Dall'Orto

Con leggerezza pensosa per clarinetto, violino, violoncello | 1990 Iosco | Grassini | Perardi

Shard per chitarra | 1997 Del Vescovo

William Shakespeare - Italo Dall'Orto

Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred per contralto e chitarra | 1938 Sciannimanico | Del Vescovo

Statement per violino | 1999 Waley-Cohen

Elegy per viola e pianoforte | 1943 Zamarra | Nardi

Gra per clarinetto | 1993 Bandieri

Fantasy per violino | 1999 Semchuk

John Hollander - Italo Dall'Orto

End of a Chapter per soprano e pianoforte | 1994 Peri | Nardi

Esprit rude/ Esprit doux per flauto e clarinetto | 1984 Marasco | Benedetti

Figment per violoncello | 1994 Nannoni

Hart Crane - Italo Dall'Orto

Voyage per contralto e pianoforte | 1943 Sciannimanico | Nardi

Fragment II per quartetto | 1994 Waley-Cohen | Righele | Rassekhi | Ricciardi

*Traduzione di Gemma Castelli e Igina Tattoni (Università La Sapienza Roma)

Alla fine del concerto: Tavola Rotonda con la partecipazione di Dorothea Gail, Gregorio Nardi e Gianfranco Vinay



Fragment for string quartet was composed on August 30, 1994 in Southbury, Connecticut in memory of my good friend and colleague, David Huntley. This short work uses harmonics for the strings throughout, which, I hope, give a poignant character to my musical message. It had its premiere by the Kronos Quartet in New York at a concert dedicated to the memory of David on October 13, 1994. Elliott Carter

Scrivo in vento, for flute alone, dedicated to the wonderful flautist and friend, Robert Aitken, takes its title from a poem of Petrarca who lived in and around Avignon from 1326 to 1353. It uses the flute to present contrasting musical ideas and registers to suggest the paradoxical nature of the poem. It was first performed on 20 July 1991 (coincidentally on Petrarch’s 678th birthday) at the Ville Rencontres de la Chartreuse of the Centre Acanthes devoted to my music at the Festival of Avignon, France, by Robert Aitken. Elliott Carter

Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi, for solo violin, was composed for the 1984 Festival Pontino celebrating the 80th birthday of Petrassi, Italy's foremost living composer. It was first performed at a festival concert in the medieval refectory of the Abbey of Fossanova, Priverno, Italy, by Georg Mönch on June 15, 1984. Elliott Carter

Warble for Lilac-time was composed in 1943 during a period when I was particularly concerned with giving my compositions an American flavor and consequently set poems by American poets like Robert Frost, Hart Crane, Mark van Doren, and Walt Whitman. Whitman’s "Warble for Lilac-time" (from the sequence Autumn Rivulets) is a return in reminiscence to impressions of spring in America and a transcendental vision of its meaning. In the song, I tried to catch Whitman’s visionary rapture, using smooth-flowing diatonic lines in the accompaniment and a lyric vocal line that becomes increasingly rhapsodic as the song progresses. Elliott Carter

GRA (‘Play’ in Polish) for solo clarinet, was written as a tribute to my dear friend, Witold Lutoslawski, to commemorate his 80th birthday.  During the twenty-five or so years that I have known Witold, I have never ceased to admire his impressive works and his gracious personality.  This clarinet piece combines frequently changing, playful characters together (all based on the same material) and recalls to me my many delighted visits with the composer in America and Poland. Elliott Carter

Statement – Remembering Aaron is the first of several Lauds of friends of past years for solo violin. This one recalls Aaron Copland whose orchestral Statements have always interested me and includes ideas from his Ukelele Serenade and other works. It also suggests the warmth and generosity and nobility that meant so much to me. This solo was commissioned by the violinist Ole Bøhn and was composed in February 1999. Elliott Carter
Shard, composed for David Starobin’s 1997 “New Dance” recording, is a short, lively, and whimsical guitar fragment, later incorporated into my Luimen. Elliott Carter

Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred: John Houseman and Orson Welles were working in the Mercury Theatre here in New York; they were very successful, so they began recording some Shakespeare plays. It was on that occasion that they asked me to write incidental music for The Merchant of Venice, and in an effort to do something appropriate I composed that piece, which sounded a little like an imitation of Dowland. Elliott Carter

Con Leggerezza Pensosa was commissioned by Dr. Raffaele Pozzi, the director of the Istituto di Studi Musicali in Latina, Italy, as an homage to the Italian author, Italo Calvino, to be performed in connection with the institute’s first annual awards for the best musicological papers of the year. Italo Calvino, who died after writing but before giving his Norton Lectures at Harvard University, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Lezioni americane), was singled out for this homage because he presents in these lectures a new view of humanism which has become an inspiration for the Istituto di Studi Musicali. The title was suggested by the remark Calvino makes in his lecture on Lightness: "spero innanzitutto d’aver dimostrato che esiste una leggerezza della pensosità, così come tutti sappiamo che esiste una leggerezza della frivolezza; anzi, la leggerezza pensosa può far apparire la frivolezza come pesante e opaca." (Above all I hope to have shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we know there is a lightness of frivolity. In fact, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.)
My short piece for clarinet, violin and cello was written in June 1990. Elliott Carter

Scritta originalmente per violoncello e pianoforte, Elegy fu dapprima trascritta per quartetto d’archi nel 1946, poi per orchestra d’archi nel 1952, infine profondamente rielaborata per viola e pianoforte nel 1961. Una nuova versione per violoncello e pianoforte è stata recentemente presentata a Torino. La versione per viola rinuncia ad alcuni stilemi tipici degli insegnamenti di Nadia Boulanger, e supera in parte anche le reminiscenze di Copland e Barber che affioravano nelle due prime versioni.
Gregorio Nardi

The idea of composing a solo cello piece had been in the back of my mind for many years, especially since so many cellists had been urging me to do so. When Thomas Demenga asked me for this at my 85th birthday concert in Basel (in 1994) for a concert he was giving sponsored by the Naumberg Foundation in New York, I soon set to work. Thomas Demenga had already impressed me greatly when he played some of my chamber works at my 80th birthday concert in Badenweiler, Germany and especially by his wonderful recording of these works for ECM, New Series.
Figment, for cello solo, presents a variety of contrasting, dramatic moments, using material derived from one musical idea. Elliott Carter
End of a chapter (from Of Challenge and of Love): John Hollander’s poetry has fascinated me for many years because of its poetic skills, its awareness of our cultural past and its wide-ranging modern expressivity. So when Lucy Shelton (whose performances of my work are superb) and the Aldeburgh Festival proposed that I write a cycle for her, I accepted with great pleasure. The choice of the texts from many of Hollander’s books and a type-written script of Quatrains from Harp Lake (which John tells me is the Sea of Galilee) are basically focused around the character of that poem with its brief, vividly contrasting quatrains that have an under-current of irony and deep anxiety that is also found in the other four poems in different ways. The score was composed in the last months of 1994 in New York City. Elliott Carter

Deeply convinced of the power of music and his own compositional direction, Roger Sessions was one of the most interesting and widely cultivated persons I have known. His music always impressed me, so when he kindly offered to look over some of my early scores, I was greatly flattered. However, I never studied with him. As composers-in-residence in Berlin in 1964, I came to appreciate how his convictions were combined with charm and humor. In this Fantasy for solo violin, written in April 1999 for Rolf Schulte, I have tried to honor Sessions in my own way. Elliott Carter

Esprit rude \ Esprit doux: The piece arose as a commission from the Sudwestfunk, but the dedicatee is Boulez, who celebrated his sixtieth birthday in 1984. For that occasion the Baden-Baden radio broadcast several concerts of Boulez’s music and they also invited several composers to write pieces in tribute to him. So I wrote Esprit rude/Esprit doux. The title refers to the rough and smooth breathing of ancient Greek, because I had noticed that both kinds of breathing occurred in the words “Hexekoston etos”, which mean “sixtieth year” in Greek. So I thought that would make an amusing title. Elliott Carter

Voyage: There are three protagonists: the Sea which is the medium through which everything in the poem moves and changes and to which every idea is referred, Love (to whom the poem is addressed), and the Poet.
The argument (stripped of symbols and conditions) runs something like this: Since Love is never far from his thoughts and represents the most desirable of conditions (first section, lines 1–8), the Poet entreats Love to allow him to go safely through an ordeal which will bring him under Love’s power (second section, lines 1–8).
The Sea is thought of under several aspects. In the first section, the relation of sea to sky suggests the unifying, harmonizing power of love; while in the second, the sea forms an obstacle to be voyaged through to reach Love. At the end of each part, the transforming power of the sea (with the peril of loss of identity) looms up as a danger which, by implication, is like that of love. This transforming power is exemplified in the ordering of images and ideas in the poem itself, which uses many metaphors and moves rapidly from one level of meaning to another.
Love, in the same manner, is in one place an actual person and in another seems transformed into the principle or power under whose spell the Poet wishes to come.  . . . I assume that the poem is addressed to the power, Love, although it can just as well be explained in terms of a particular person. In this respect the poem has a double meaning.
. . . Certainly the tragic career of Hart Crane himself throws one kind of light on the matter. In fact, viewed autobiographically, this particular work can be considered as a prophecy of his own personal voyage through life, which met its end when he willfully extinguished himself in the hands of the sea. Elliott Carter (1945)

Hart Crane: He was an unusual person, with great poetic insights overflowing into utopia, but very unrealistic. He was unable to deal with the contradictions that arose in his life and ended up an alcoholic and a suicide. A dramatic figure, a true accursed poet, a sort of American Rimbaud, if you like! Elliott Carter (1989)

Fragment II for string quartet is a tribute to the Arditti String Quartet that has so wonderfully championed my music. It was first performed when that quartet was awarded the Von Siemens Musikpreis in Munich on June 23, 1999. Elliott Carter