Xenia Ensemble (Turin, Italy)
EstOvest Festival 2010 | 150th Anniversary of Italian Unification
'Ogni cinquanta, a Torino' (string quartet and piano)
Winner of the competition for Italian composers dedicated to the celebrations of the 150th Anniversary of the Unification of Italy, organized by the Xenia Ensemble association, within the framework of the EstOvest Festival 2010"A Journey into Today's Music".
Allegro moderato
Calmo
Tango. Allegro
Finale. Allegro vivace
Giuseppe Concone, Alfredo Casella, Piero Piccioni
Three composers born in Turin, in the first Capital of the Kingdom of Italy. Authors immersed in their own musical world and meanwhile conscious spectators of three fundamental stages in the history of our Unification of Italy.
The suite consists of four short tableaus. The movements intend to offer the listener as many musical moments associated with well-defined chronological milestones reached by the Unification of Italy: 1861 (Proclamation of the Kingdom), 1911, 1961, and 2011.
The first three tableaus of the suite consist of the elaboration of pieces taken from the musical production of as many Turin composers who lived in the 19th and 20th centuries, through the use of a distorting lens suggested by a contemporary approach to material from previous eras. The fourth and final movement of the suite is written in a style more free from the constraints of the past, although it represents a sort of compendium of certain sonic references from the three previous movements.
The compositions that constitute the foundations of the reworking of the first three tableaus are—deliberately—not taken from the corpus of works expressly inspired by the celebrations for the anniversaries of the Unification of Italy, but rather from works that saw the light in the three years of reference and which intend to represent a sort of "snapshot" of the production of the three authors. The intention is therefore to manipulate, elaborate, and fuse writing styles belonging to the two previous centuries with a contemporary language and vision.
The brief research carried out, with the purpose of drafting the project and subsequently realizing the composition, allowed for an approach to the cultural, historical, and social environment that surrounded the three composers born in Turin; an environment that would transform profoundly and inexorably over the course of a century and a half. The primary objective of the suite can be summarized in the purpose of offering the listener an ideal "embrace" toward the three Piedmontese composers; a tribute to their small or large contribution to Italian music over the last 150 years.
