VINCENZO GALILEI CHOIR OPENS THE CORSANICO FESTIVAL FOR 2018
In the evocative artistic setting of Corsanico’s Pieve di S. Michele Arcangelo the Corsanico 2018 festival opens with the prestigious patronage of the Senate, of the Tuscany Region, Province of Lucca and Comune di Massarosa.
It’s the 37th year of the International Classical Music Festival organized by the Cultural Association “Friends of the Vincenzo Colonna Organ of Corsanico” with Graziano Barsotti as artistic director.
There are ten themed concerts, five in July and five in August, which will all include the historical organ now recognized throughout the world. The intrument is a masterpiece of Venetian organ art built in 1602 by Vincenzo Colonna.
The opening of the festival, on Friday 6 July, will feature Pisa’s Vincenzo Galilei choir (from the Scuola Normale Superiore) and the organist Pietro Consoloni, conducted by Gabriele Micheli, with “Psalms in music from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century”.
Friday, July 13, features Sara Galanti (violin) and Antonio Galanti (organ) with a program of instrumental European music from the eighteenth century.
‘BOCCHERINI’ HORN ENSEMBLE
The horn ensemble of Lucca’s Boccherini Orchestra performs on Tuesday 17 July in a repertoire ranging from the baroque to the nineteenth century, entitled “Discovering the Horn” (the evening is free admission).
RECITAL BY GUITARIST FLAVIO CUCCHI
Saturday, July 21, the well-known guitarist Flavio Cucchi will present “From Vivaldi to Chick Corea”.
HOMAGE TO ANTONIO BAZZINI
Lina Uinskyte (violin) and Marco Ruggeri (organ) perform a seventeenth to nineteenth-century repertoire as “Homage to the composer Antonio Bazzini in the bicentenary of his birth”, on Friday 27 July.
CONCERT IN MEMORY OF DAVID BELLUGI
Friday, August 3, Ivano Battiston, accordion, Luca Magni, flute and Mariella Mochi, organ, will commemorate, in a classic program, the famous flautist David Bellugi who often played at Corsanico and who died recently.
CONCERT FOR ORGAN AND BAROQUE TRUMPETS
Friday, August 10th, an ensemble of baroque trumpets and organ, with Andrea Macinanti on the organ, will perform a brilliant repertoire, “The Palatine Concert”, recalling the music of European royal courts.
GRAND OPERATIC GALA
Wednesday, August 15 will be the traditional “Gran Galà Lirico” with Francesca Maionchi-soprano, Laura Masini-mezzo-soprano, Nicola Simone Mugnaini-tenor, Graziano Polidori-bass, and Nadia Lencioni, piano. The program includes music by Mascagni, Puccini, Verdi, Rossini and Chopin.
VIVALDI EVENING
Saturday, August 18th, there’s a Vivaldi evening: “Serata Vivaldi” with the Ensemble Bisentium playing a basoon concerto and The Four Seasons, with Federico Lodovichi, bassoon and Daniele Iannaccone, violin.
BACH EVENING
On Saturday 25th August an evening of Bach, “Serata Bach” (concertos by J. S. Bach), will conclude the Corsanico Festival 2018, with the Greve in Chianti Chamber Orchestra, with Cristiano Rossi as conductor. solo violins: Cristiano Rossi, Luca Rinaldi and Agnese Balestracci.
This is an extract of what I wrote in 2013 when I looked over the fence at Giacomo Puccini’s last house:
A similar fate of neglect appears to be that awaiting Puccini’s last house in Viareggio. Not too many know about this house or where it is. I was determined, however, to find it and clear directions from a newsagent on Viareggio’s esplanade took me there. It’s, in fact, opposite the Pineta di Ponente, a couple of blocks from the seafront.
Why did Puccini move to Viareggio when he loved his little villa at Torre Del Lago so much? For two reasons: first, a peat extraction company had moved near his villa and started digging with mechanical means, producing noise which the sensitive master (or anyone else, for that matter) couldn’t tolerate. Second, the master’s health had begun to deteriorate, largely through his eighty-a-day (and five cigars) smoking habit (he especially favoured gold-tipped Sobranie) and it was thought that somewhere nearer a big centre like Viareggio would be more convenient, especially in days when roads and communications were not what they are now. In Viareggio Puccini had a ‘bungalow’ built for him by one of his favourite architects.
(Actually, I should add that Puccini had already owned the land on which he was to build his dream house since 1915. He had bought it, in fact, for his mistress, baroness Josephine von Stengel , who subsequently thought better and returned to her husband Arnold von Stengel ). Sadly, she died in 1926 just two years after Puccini’s death, aged just 39.
If you think that a seaside bungalow evokes visions of Peacehaven-on-sea then think again. The new bungalow is a marvellous thing, built in an eclectic style by architect Vincenzo Pilotti, and with ceramic decorations by Galileo Chini who went on to teach architecture and design at the court of the king of Siam (now Thailand) whose throne room he decorated. Indeed, there is an oriental perfume about this house.
I wonder, however, if, like the Chinese courtiers, Giacomo still hankered after his beloved Torre Del Lago. He certainly must have missed the easy reach of the second of his three great hunting passions, shooting at water-fowl on the lake. (The other two of the composer’s hunting passions, if you didn’t know them, were good opera libretti and beautiful women).
It is impossible to get into Puccini’s last house and almost impossible, too, to view its exterior in its entirety – so overgrown is the garden around it. One can’t even read the commemorative plaque placed on its façade clearly.
All this, however, is going to change. In 2011 a court decision resolved the litigation which had been going on as to Puccini’s house at Viareggio and authors’ rights. The Fondazione Puccini gained two-thirds of the remaining rights for the operas (from ‘Fanciulla’ onwards) and also received the Viareggio villa – acquisitions equivalent to a sum of well over a million euros. I hope that it’s going to open to the public in the not-too-distant future….
In fact, nothing changed until 2015 since there were further significant court decisions to be overcome, also relating to the fact that the property had become ‘demaniale’, i.e. state-owned. In Italy, if anything becomes ‘demaniale’ it regrettably may predict an atrophic disaster.
In 2016 I wrote (extract):
Viareggio’s supreme Chinese connection is a building which conveniently lies between Via Marco Polo, the first Italian traveller to China, and the Piazza Puccini. It was the house Puccini had built by his architect friend Pilotti (who’d also designed his villa at Torre Del Lago) with decorations by Galileo Chini. (Chini incidentally designed the scenery for Puccini’s last opera). With an almost Indochinese, indeed Laotian feel to it, the building provided the immortal maestro with a much needed escape from the noise that the newly-founded peat extraction factory near his beloved Torre Del Lago villa was now grinding out. (How could even the famous Puccini not have stopped this factory from being set up? What regard did the Italian government have for their greatest composer’s peace and quiet?).
Chinese-looking, indeed Indo-Chinese looking, is this highly attractive bungalow now thankfully saved from the disastrously dilapidated condition I last saw it in a few years ago. A victim of a typically interminable Italian law-suit the villa finally became the property of the Puccini foundation in 2012. The garden had been cleared of its brambles and I was at last able to read the plaque placed on one of its walls.
La comunità di Viareggio promette di costudire consacrati a GIACOMO PUCCINI
e casa e bosco che furono reggia e giardino alla splendente regina Turandot.
(The community of Viareggio promises to look after the house and the woods, consecrated to GIACOMO PUCCINI, which were the palace and garden of the resplendent queen Turandot).
Let’s hope they really carry out that promise this time!
The portico is lovely and reminded me of a sweet country place we’d stayed at Luang Prabang, Laos last December.
But the cherry on the icing was that it was in this very house that Puccini composed his masterpiece, Turandot, all about the tortured love of Calaf for the ice-cold Chinese princess, Turandot, who eventually melts into his arms when she discovers the secret word ‘Love’:
La casa e bosco che furono reggia e giardino alla splendente regina Turandot
If love makes the world truly go round then I was surely moved. Like his neighbours during the time Giacomo Puccini was composing his last opera, I imagined I could catch the music from this transcendently ecstatic work on his piano (now at the Villa Torre del Lago).
On Saturday 23 June this year I was privileged to visit Puccini’s last house at Viareggio for the very first time. The visit had to be pre-booked and was to be described as an overview rather than an official visit. No interior photographs were allowed to be taken, principally for the reasons of security and for the fact that, frankly, the present condition of the house is rather dilapidated and not what your standard historical villa tourist would like to be presented with. The visit was free but its aim was to encourage visitors to publicise its presence and to help in finding generous benefactors.
The house looks towards the pine-wood and not towards the beach. Evidently Puccini didn’t like the sea! Another thing: Puccini was only able to enjoy the house for very few years. It was finally completed in 1921 (with the characteristic Italian tradition of ‘tettoiaggio’ i.e. placing a flag on the completed roof and having a party) and in 1924 Puccini died in a Brussels clinic after a supposedly successful operation.
We were greeted by Signor Viani, who has a distinguished family tree which includes one of Italy’s greatest twentieth century painters, Lorenzo Viani. We were then shown around by three charming girls from Viareggio’s secondary schools who were very well prepared in their knowledge of the house.
They explained that the true architect of the house was Puccini. He would thumb through ‘House and Garden’ type magazines from all parts of the world and when he found something that he liked, whether it be the design of a balustrade or the beams on a ceiling or the shape of a fireplace, he would consult his architect Vincenzo Pilotti. (Strangely, a school friend, who became one of the United Kingdom’s most distinguished architectural writers, but who sadly died at the end of last year, signed his brilliantly written critiques of modern architecture in ‘Private Eye’, Piloti –this time, of course, alluding to Le Corbusier’s trade-mark of standing buildings, stilt-like, on rows of concrete pillars).
Even if Puccini called it his ‘bungalow’ the house actually has two storeys although the ground floor could more appropriately be entitled the basement.
The details of the house are absolutely stunning and all chosen by Puccini from his artist friends, especially Chini who was in charge of the ceramics:
I felt that the house owed quite a bit to Frank Lloyd Wright, in particular the Darwin D. Martin house with its horizontal emphasis and its layout with an L-shaped format. I was told, in fact, that Puccini received house design magazines from the U.S.A. where he’d scored a great success with ‘The Girl from the Golden West’, starring Caruso as Dick Johnson in a work specially written for the greatest tenor of all time, in 1910. (For more detail see my post on Enrico Caruso at https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/the-greatest-of-all-singers-his-villa/ )
We first visited the piano nobile. Here we were shown Giacomo and Elvira’s son Antonio’s bedroom with his en suite bathroom complete with attractive tiles and a bidet. We saw the dining room with a dumb waiter connected to the kitchen below and a service room where Puccini’s servants would wait to attend to their famous household at dinner time. We then saw another fabulous bathroom with beautiful chamfered orange tiles and next Giacomo and Elvira’s two bedrooms (for they slept separately, although their beds were placed with the respective headboards next to each other and just divided by a wall. Puccini’s bedroom had a little door leading down a narrow staircase to his study in the ground floor (or basement) where he would do his composing, mostly at night.
We then walked down a long and wide corridor leading to the main staircase and were advised not to descend if we suffered from respiratory or allergic dysfunctions. It was easy to see (or smell) why. The dankness in the basement, the mould of the walls, the floor, which until quite recently had been submerged in a foot of water, emanated that decayed smell of advanced decomposition and putrefaction which one associates more appropriately with Edgar Allan Poe tales.
Here were the servants’ quarters and an ample kitchen with a large cooking area. Here too was the central heating boiler, albeit a little rusty. Here were the pipes leading to the chunky radiators in the floor above and here, too, was the creator’s kernel, the piano room and, adjoining it, the library where he would keep his music scores (which included everything from Palestrina to Wagner to Debussy and to the latest productions of Schoenberg – Pierrot Lunaire).
It was empty, all empty: the piano on which he composed everything from Madama Butterfly to Turandot, now in the pristinely kept tourist mecca of Puccini’s house in Lucca; the shelves decayed and vacant, the decorations and stencils eaten away by the inexorably devouring dampness.
And yet….
….I have never come closer to Puccini’s ethereal presence as in this house. As we entered the maestro’s study situated below his bedroom and reached by a hidden staircase and were told that it was here that he composed all that remains by his own hand of ‘Turandot’, and as a recently discovered film (now digitally projected) showed him in this very room, walking past the same staircase that was next to us, looking into the fireplace that stood before us I felt my whole being shiver and my eyes became moist. It was an overwhelmingly traumatic experience which I have never quite experienced before and which I did my best to hide at the time.
We emerged into the garden which Mr Viani and his volunteers had cleaned up so that it now looked less like a Cambodian jungle than ever before. We admired the sprinkler system Puccini had had installed, the first one in Italy. We saw the caretaker’s house with, below, the garage where the master kept his last car, a Lancia Lambda which Puccini regarded as the best vehicle he’d ever bought (he usually didn’t drive his cars after the disastrous accident of 1903 which almost cost him his life and preferred to be chauffered instead (even on a motor-bike, in the side-car, naturally…). The garage entrance was the first in Italy to be self-opening. Puccini loved the latest technology!
I was particularly moved by the paw marks of Puccini’s favourite English setter dog set in concrete near his kennel. I don’t know the name of the dog but dogs were Puccini’s companion for many years in his favourite occupation (apart from writing operas and seducing women) which was hunting.
I could not find much sign of the radio aerial on the roof of the house for Puccini was also one of the first Italians to own a radio and receive broadcasts. At an evening with friends that included Toscanini he switched on the radio and heard a live broadcast from the New York Met of his opera ‘Madam Butterfly’. Toscanini said to Puccini, listening intently through the somewhat crackly reception ‘that proves Giacomo that you and your art truly belong to the world.’ So true!
Later, as my friends and I relaxed in the wonderfully restored art deco (Aldo Castelfranco, 1938) setting of Viareggio’s premier bathing establishment, the ‘Principe di Piemonte’ we admitted that we all of us experienced the same haunting feeling that Giacomo Puccini was looking at us with his gaze, half of ‘mestizia toscana’ and half of ‘spensieratezza’.
I have visited many houses of famous composers: from Beethoven’s in Bonn, to Mozart’s in Salzburg and Vienna, from Dvorack’s in Prague to Handel’s in London but never, in their beautifully restored and presented interiors, have I felt such almost frighteningly real presence of their illustrious musicians.
I applaud Mr Viani and his small band of volunteers who have saved our princess Turandot.
In the sylvan suburb of Elmstead Woods, South London there’s an arts-and-crafts villa, built by Robert Whyte, filled with the evocation of a family who loved music.
The Whyte sisters played quartets and eminent musicians such as Sir Adrian Boult and Paul Tortelier were honoured guests.
The villa has since become known as the Ripley arts centre for the borough of Bromley. On the 8th of June this year we attended a harpsichord concert performed by long-time friend Gilbert Rowland.
With his impeccable technique and sensitivity Gilbert presented a program which included suites by Handel and sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, Matheson and Soler.
Gilbert Rowland (whose father was second in command to the Viceroy of India under the Raj) was born in Glasgow but now lives in London. His teachers included Fernando Valenti and Millicent Silver and his first recital took place at Fenton House, which I have described at https://longoio3.com/2017/10/26/harpsichord-heaven-in-hampstead/
Gilbert Rowland has, besides a distinguished career as soloist, an equally illustrious one as a recording artist. He established Keyboard records in order to record all of Domenico Scarlatti’s 555 sonatas, or ‘esercizi’, written for Maria Bárbara who became queen of Spain in 1746. In addition, Gilbert has recorded all Antonio Soler’s sonatas in a highly praised series for Naxos. Other recordings include harpsichord works by Handel Albero, Rameau, and Mattheson. I have several of these recordings and the Soler, in particular, blossoms into extraordinary life under Rowland’s amazing touch.
Gilbert’s harpsichord was built after an 18th century French model (Pascal Taskin) by Andrew Wooderson of Bexley, one of the increasing band of supremely crafted early instrument makers in England.
The concert was held in the delightful music room the Whyte family added in the 1920’s.
It was an absolute pleasure to hear Gilbert Rowland again after so many years as these excerpts taken from the evening’s performance demonstrate:
What else could one desire to listen to more on this charmed fire-fly dazzled evening … perhaps the song of the nightingale and the soft breath of one’s beloved?
It was in Oxleas Woods, South London, that, in happier times, we immersed ourselves in Shakespeare’s play, accompanied by sylvan elves and gossamer fairies, enacted in bluebell glades in the darkening umbrage of this beautiful part of the city I was born and brought up in.
The Santissima Annunziata (Holy Annunciation) is the church situated opposite one of the best gelati places in the first square one comes across on Barga’s main street from its gateway at the fosso.
The church was built in 1595 to house two wooden statues of the Virgin Mary and the Announcing Angel sculpted by a Tuscan master of the early fourteenth century. The church’s interior is baroque, almost Rococo, in its delicate plasterwork.
In the church’s transept are two large nineteenth-century frescoes depicting the Marriage of the Virgin and the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple painted by Giammattei in Lucca, who also decorated the cupola.
I’d never ventured inside the church before and was quite surprised at the beauty of its interior. This immaculate setting and its fine acoustics gave a special resonance to the three choirs which feasted us last Friday and continued an end-of-term tradition which has become an annual feature of Barga’s lively musical scene.
This was the programme for the evening:
The first choir from Lucca’s Istituto Machiavelli under their conductor Marco Musto warmed us up with a sweet arrangement of ‘Danny Boy’ sung with rather good English pronunciation. The other items were also very adequately delivered. Amazingly the last item was only rehearsed three days previously. This, in my opinion, is a choir that can only develop to greater heights.
The second choir needs no introduction. Don Toti’s expertise with high renaissance polyphonic music is one of the joys of Garfagnana and his choir’s interpretation, especially of Victoria’s ‘O Magnum Mysterium’, filled the church with radiant effect. I felt, however, that the tenor section needed better blending with more numbers. Any volunteers?
Andrea Salvoni’s indefatigable efforts in creating a choir from Barga’s I.S.I. institute has produced a group that is fully able to approach a variety of idioms from classical to gospel. I particularly enjoyed the ‘Pie Jesu’ from Webber’s ‘Requiem’. The duet singing of Caterina Pieretti and Maria Carla Lupi was quite ravishing.
The choir received a well-deserved extended applause:
It’s not an easy thing to get a choir together in Italy. The British tradition of cathedral choirs with their impeccably high standards simply does not exist in Italy and too many schools do not have adequate facilities to devote much time to music. Standards in so many choirs here are not all that high and recruitment to them is another problem. The fact that we were able to hear and truly enjoy three choirs, each one with its own character, and each one with singers and directors who have devoted voluntarily so much of their free time to music, augurs well for the future of Italian choral singing in the Lucchesia.
Rossini’s ‘Petite Messe Solennelle’ at Ponte last Sunday (which I announced at https://longoio3.com/2018/04/23/a-little-solemn-mass/ ) got me to write the following comments on Facebook in both Italian and English after its performance. I’m re-printing them here in case you’re not connected to FB.
Un trionfo assoluto la ‘Petite Messe Solennelle’, eseguita ieri pomeriggio nella colma chiesa dello SS Crocifisso a Ponte a Serraglio. Il Maestro Biancalana, Viareggino, notissimo direttore di coro di fama internazionale, con apprezzatissime incisioni al suo credito, mi ha finalmente, col suo ensemble, che ha studiato per mesi questo capolavoro, rivelato la grandezza di Rossini nel pantheon musicale, fino ad ora considerato principalmente per le sue divertenti opere buffe, tra le quali il famoso Barbiere. Due ore di musica sentita, ben eseguita, divina..…come disse Shakespeare, la musica è il cibo dell’amore.
***
An absolute triumph for the ‘Petite Messe Solennelle’ performed yesterday afternoon in the brim-full church of the Holy Crucifix in Ponte a Serraglio. Maestro Biancalana, from Viareggio, internationally renowned choir conductor, with highly acclaimed recordings to his credit, has finally, with his ensemble, revealed to me Rossini’s greatness in the musical pantheon, someone, who, until now, I considered mainly for his amusing comic operas among which the famous Barber. Two hours of music truly felt, well played, divine … … as Shakespeare said, music is the food of love.
Up to 1965 there were still some working mills in the Fegana valley. Now they have all been converted into private residences or holiday accommodation. One of these mills was restored in 1990 and, until relatively recently, provided not so much B n B but home hospitality as its extrovert host liked to term it.
Here are some views around the mill. In particular note the bridge which has had to be rebuilt no less than seven times because of the river flood waters which have swept previous versions away.
A fine round trip to do either on two wheels or four from Longoio is to go down to Bagni di Lucca and go towards Calavorno but turn right at the big roundabout and head up the very attractive Fegana valley.
There are two main villages to discover: Tereglio and Vitiana. Tereglio is a particularly fine ‘borgo’ stretched along a ridge, possessing a very beautiful church and holding an annual violoncello master class under Sebastian Comberti and Raphael Wallfisch, all described in my post at https://longoio.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/the-violoncelli-of-tereglio/
However, for the circular tour one should turn right at the sign for the Orrido di Botri canyon and Montefegatesi. Here it’s possible to stop at the Nido dell ’Aquila restaurant (see http://www.ilnidodell-aquila.com/cms/ ).
From the Nido the road proceeds uphill towards Montefegatesi through a magical chestnut forest. Be warned, however, that the road is from this point mostly unmetalled and can be a bit skiddy in wet weather unless one has appropriate tyres.
From Montefegatesi it’s an easy ride down into Val di Lima to Longoio.
The possibilities of this route are endless. Here are some of them:
A visit to Tereglio
An exploration of the orrido di Botri canyon.
A visit to Montefegatesi
A sortie up to Albereta and a climb to the top of the Prato Fiorito which, at this time of year is full of an intoxicating species of wild daffodils. (See my post at https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2017/05/18/elysium-on-earth/ for more of this amazing sight.
A walk through the chestnut forest.
A continuation up the grand ducal road to the Foce a Giovo pass and a ramble on the grand Apennine ridgeway path number 00.
Why go on a world tour when a whole miniature world is displayed for you here in the space of just one day?
The biggest names in classical music together with young international stars meet in Castelnuovo Garfagnana from June 22nd to July 8th 2017 for the International Academy of Music Festival.
There will be twenty concerts by some of the best international artists in the International Academy of Music Festival, an event that, since 2003, brings to the Serchio Valley some of the best chamber music interpreters and is now in its sixteenth year.
The event, sponsored by the Tuscany Region and part of the “La Toscana dei Festival” regional project, attracts yearly around two hundred musicians from all over the world to entertain Castelnuovo and the Serchio Valley, thanks to the organization of Castelnuovo di Garfagnana’s Civic School of Music.
OPENING JAZZ CONCERT
On Friday, June 22, the festival opens with a jazz session at 9.30 pm in Piazza Umberto I (Castelnuovo Garfagnana) with the Fresu-Bonaventura duo, a special event sponsored by Banca Mediolanum. It’s a musical dialogue with wind and brass instruments permeated by Mediterranean lyricism. Paolo Fresu and Daniele Di Bonaventura, together with the Filetta choir of the successful “Mistico Mediterraneo” project with the album of the same name, recently published by the prestigious ECM label, are here as a more intimate duo. Attracted by ethnic, classical and electronic music, the two jazz musicians present a sort of poetic distillation of the project that has long characterized their increasingly frequent performances. The duo recorded a new CD in the spring of 2015
It’s going to be a very lively concert that that fully reflects all aspects of the contemporary music scene.
JAZZ QUARTET WITH PIERO GADDI AND FABRIZIO DESIDERI
On Friday June 29th Piero Gaddi and Fabrizio Desideri perform in a completely new project. They will inaugurate their collaboration with two professionals, percussionist Francesco Petreni and double-bass player Filippo Pedol, and mark the return of the International Academy of Music Festival to the beautiful ambience of Castiglione di Garfagnana. The Desideri-Gaddi quartet will present its own pieces: a jazz that knows how to move between spontaneous enjoyment and an always open frontier of research and experimentation.
On Saturday 30 June, in the elegant setting of Piazza Umberto I of Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, a highly evocative opera, ‘Porgy & Bess’, will be performed.
George Gershwin’s ‘Porgy & Bess’, is performed in the fascinating version by Gil Evans. Against the unique backdrop of the Rocca Ariostesca castle, the wind and brass orchestra of the Puccini Conservatory of La Spezia will give the public one of the twentieth century’s finest as well as one of its best known works. Conducted by Alessandro Fabbri, the performers will play immortal melodies like ‘Summertime’ and there’s a great trumpeter Manolo Nardi in an evening of great music.
High up on the hills above Ponte a Moriano is a transcendentally white building presenting an almost a grail-like vision – indeed it is called the Academy of Montegral and was once the Convento dell’Angelo of the Passionist fathers – the ones who attracted Lucca’s neglected Saint Gemma so much.
The convent, designed by Lorenzo Nottolini (he of the Ponte delle Catene at Bagni di Lucca and so many others of the finest buildings in the Lucca countryside), and built for the Passionist fathers, still remains their property although, due to falling vocational demand, it is now leased (for 999 years!) to the Academy of Montegral as a finishing school for musicians both vocal and instrumental.
The Academy of Montegral, the brainwave of Maestro Gustav Kuhn, (pupil of Karajan, and, among other prestigious posts, former musical director of Rome opera), was founded in 1992 with the aim of developing a holistic musicianship on a human scale. In 2000 it moved to the convent, reinforcing the idea of a spiritual and cultural musical community. The results show – I doubt if music making can really get much better than this in Lucca province.
It was, therefore, an awesome challenge for the Stereo-tipi choir to audition and then be invited by maestro Kuhn to master classes and, finally, to sing in the Mass for Ascension Day (and Mother’s day, too) on Sunday, 13th May. (PS A member of this choir, Andrea Salvoni, is our choirmaster at Ghivizzano and some choir members have leading parts in Borgo a Mozzano’s fine music school).
This was the programme of liturgical music:
The challenge was achieved to perfection and we were treated to a liturgical event heightened by great music sung by a choir who I can surely say is one of the very few in the region to reach anywhere near to the high standards of such English choirs as The Sixteen and The King’s singers.
The Spanish composer Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548 –1611) stands in a holy trinity of renaissance polyphonic vocal music composers together with Palestrina and Lassus. Victoria’s ‘Missa Ascendens’ from his middle period is both concise and highly organised with a melodic theme taken from his motet of the same name.
The Stereo-tipi were organised in the choir stalls semi-circularly arranged behind the high altar and almost hidden by it. Yet the genius of architect Nottolini ensured that the acoustics here are quite perfect and the choir rose to spread its fine singing with near-perfect intonation and dynamic range throughout this neo-classical gem.
Each part of the Proper of the Mass gained in stature and the closing Agnus Dei was particularly touched with beauty.
Kuhn always likes to put this melting number at the end of the Mass.
As befits a singing academy the Mass, celebrated by Fr Ottaviano and Giovanni Battista of the Passionist order, had some fine solo performances by Maria Radoeva and Paola Leggeri.
I felt this was one of Kuhn’s most successful contributions to music for liturgical celebrations in the convent of the Angel. First, the choir stalls were used to full effect. Second, the music to the Mass was all of one piece: a sublime masterpiece by a supreme polyphonic master. Third, the music fitted the day to a T: an Ascension Mass on the Ascension Day of Our Redeemer.
An added bonus was that my wife’s mother, just three years short of her centennial, was with us as befitted the occasion which was also Mother’s day, something celebrated in da Pinzo’s excellent trattoria in Ponte a Moriano where we enjoyed a truly tasty lunch after the Mass in one of Lucca provinces most heavenly churches. (I chose Da Pinzo’s own named pizza).
To slightly misquote that great British conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, I may not understand much about contemporary music but I like the sound a lot of it makes.
When one thinks of Lucca and music Puccini clearly comes to the forefront: Giacomo Puccini Jr. that is, since the composer of three of the ten most frequently performed operas in the world came at the end of a long line of musicians like many other composers: J. S. Bach, for example.
In his life-time Puccini was considered avant-garde, particularly in the use of whole-tone scales (‘Madama Butterfly’), exotic orchestration (‘Turandot’) and clashing dissonances ‘(La Fanciulla’, ‘Tosca’) and also in his musical structures. Puccini must, indeed, have sounded a very progressive composer when first heard and still does today if one listens to him with fresh ears. Among Puccini’s admirers for example was Anton Webern.
Today Lucca continues to preserve its open-minded approach to modern music, particularly through ‘Cluster’, its association for contemporary composers. Cluster’s president and founder member is Francesco Cipriano, also a fine composer, brilliant pianist and editor of the on-line review of music events in Lucca province ‘Luccamusica’ of which I curate the English version – See http://www.luccamusica.it/language/en/).
There was a time when current music seemed to me to be largely of the ‘crash, bang, wallop’ variety. (I mention no composers’ names in this regard). Happily, in today’s scene, anything goes so long, of course, as it is well-crafted and genuinely meant. Sonority is the name of the game and the sound of music can range from sparse minimalism to lush romanticism.
Today, there’s no such thing as an old-fashioned modern composer as such greats as Vaughan-Williams and Finzi used to be called in their time. If one feels like writing a hummable melody that’s fine. Reminiscences of past composers may be collaged, the variety of instrumental combinations knows no limits, and melodic forms create ever new varieties. It’s important to realise that music, like any other art does not progress in the way say astro-physics does. Music creates new knowledge of organised sounds by a sort of ever-changing fruition borne of the landscape in which its seeds are planted. Musical creation is like a garden where great compositions are born from careful pruning and grafting of existing varieties of plants to create new species.
I recently attended this Cluster concert by the Aurora Ensemble:
As a picture can describe an infinitesimal number of words I will spare you the ‘Hans Killer’ (remember ‘Private Eye?) approach to wordless functional analysis of the music I heard and just recommend you to attend any other of the Cluster concerts when in Lucca and let your ears enter into the often astounding sonorities of contemporary music.
To take one example of how appealing music written in our time I’ll post an excerpt of Francesco Cipriano’s composition called ‘waterfalls’. Over an ostinato, descriptive of the flow of water and also with an alusion to Chopin’s ‘Revolutionary study op10.2), arpeggiando cascades begin to descend in brilliant, almost canonic-like, sequences. Then it appears to me that the music focuses on what in my mind’s eye is a description of a tropical pool such as we have come across in Saint Lucia where the turbulent falls resolve themselves into a jungle-shaded tranquillity, not without a hint of a samba rhythm, where the lianas are filled with mysterious species.
Anyway chacun a son gout; but there are so many musical tastes to savour in a relatively small city like Lucca that one is truly spoilt for choice!
(Participants and sponsors in the concert I attended. Maestro Cipriano is third from the right)
