Daniele Ghisi Geografie portrait du compositeur Catrani Gorli - STR37053 - Contemporain

To understand why dodecaphony arrive in Italy only in the nineteen-forties, we could recall Verdi’s thought when he strongly emphasised the separation between the development of German and Italian music. Dallapiccola would approach the new language of the Viennese through the illuminating revelation received from hearing, in 1935, the Concerto For Nine Instruments op.24 by Webern, a work that, though he doubted he had understood it, struck him for that ”aesthetic and stylistic unity” significant of the character of an artist “who expresses the maximum in ideas with the minimum imaginable in words”. In fact, in this observation we have the sense in which Dallapiccola embarked on the road of dodecaphony, a “dodecaphony without tears”. The coming together of the two works proposed on the CD enables us to realise how dodecaphony has innervated itself completely originally in Dallapiccola’s creative process. The journey made towards dodecaphony by Camillo Togni was marked at the beginning by his meeting, at just sixteen years, with one of the most significant composers of the “generation of ’80”, Alfredo Casella. It was a meeting suggested by his first teacher, his fellow citizen Franco Margola, in the conviction that the new teaching would correspond better to the needs of the boy, who in the same year, 1938, in Brescia, had experienced the revelation of Schoenberg’s music. We owe to Aldo Orvieto the fortunate discovery of the score of the Variazioni which did not figure in the Fondo Camillo Togni at the Fondazione Cini, and was believed to be irremediably lost; Orvieto’s intuition that the score might be preserved in the archive of Lya De Barberiis, the pianist who shared a long friendship with Togni which sprang from their attending courses in Siena by Casella and was the first interpreter of many of his compositions, was crowned with success.