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54. dubrovačke ljetne igre 54th Dubrovnik Summer Festival 2003 Hrvatska Croatia I Cameristi Italiani Solisti Soloists Vincenzo Bolognese violina violin Gianluca Littera usna harmonika accordion Atrij Kneževa dvora Rector's Palace Atrium 27. srpnja 27 July 21.30 9.30 p.m. Francesco Geminiani: 6. concerto grosso u d-molu, varijacije na Corellijevu Sonatu La Folìa za gudače Concerto Grosso No. 6 in D minor, variations on Corelli's Sonata La Folia for strings Pablo de Sarasate: Capriccio Basco, za violinu i gudače, op. 24 Capriccio Basco, for violin and strings, Op. 24 Astor Piazzolla: Ave Maria, za violinu i gudače Ave Maria, for violin and strings Henryk Wieniawski: Varijacije na vlastitu temu, za violinu i gudače Variations on a proper theme, for violin and strings * * * * * Maurice Ravel (obr arr. Gianluca Littera): Pavana za preminulu infantkinju, za usnu harmoniku i gudače Pavane pour une infante défunte (pavan for a dead Infanta), for accordion and strings James Moody: Toledo, za usnu harmoniku i gudače Toledo, for accordion and strings James Moody: Bugarsko vjenčanje, za usnu harmoniku i gudače Bulgarian Wedding, for accordion and strings Luigi Boccherini: Simfonija u d-molu, op. 12, br. 4, La casa del diavolo Symphony in D minor, Op. 12, No. 4, La casa del diavolo Andante sostenuto – Allegro assai Andantino con moto Andante sostenuto – Allegro con moto Italian string ensemble I Cameristi Italiani was formed in Rome in 1992 by the members of the former Cameristi di Santa Cecilia. All members are instrumentalists in the reputable Orchestra of Santa Cecilia in Rome. Among the utmostly successful and acclaimed concerts in Italy and abroad, outstand some special events as is the 300th anniversary of Giuseppe Tartini in Piran in 1992 at which Tartini's own Amati violin was played on after more than two centuries. In 1995 they played at the occasion of the visit of H.R.H. Prince of Wales to Italy. In 1994 and 1995 they represented their country at festive concerts honouring Italy’s Republic Day in Croatia and Slovenia; in April 2000 the ensemble gave a concert in the reopened Tartini Theatre, followed with a concert at the Grand Hall of the Fryderyk Chopin Academy in Warsaw. In May 2001 they appeared in Tokyo at the ceremony of delivery of the Leonardo Award. Their discography is mostly of lesser known or unpublished works, including original scores of Boccherini's Fandango and Night Music in the Streets of Madrid, Vivaldi's Concerto in D minor, Il piccolino, Donoràin's Over There at Kvarner…, Tartini's Concerto for viola and strings and Saverio Mercadante's Variations for horn and strings. Italian critics evaluated their CD Rarity with highest marks. Earlier this year its high achievements have been honoured with the Golden Wheel of the International Rotary Club. Violinist Vincenco Bolognese (1966) was born in Lecce. He studied with his father and with Felix Ayo at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory and Academy in Rome. He attended master courses with Salvatore Accardo, Riccardo Brengola and Pierluigi Urbini. He received reputable awards at the Curci Competition in Naples (1985 and 1986) and Paganini Competition in Genova (1987). In October 1987 he perform at a recital in the Tursi Palace on the famous Paganini violin Il Cannone; that same year he received the Golden Medallion for particularly successful artistic activity. In 1990 he was awarded the Gold medal of the Foyers des Artistes International Association in Rome. He performed as soloist with famous orchestras from Rome, Florence Turin, Naples, Siena, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Warsaw, Montevideo, etc under the baton of conductors such as Accardo Ferro, Gelmetti, Henze, Kovačev, Maag, Plasson, Sinopoli, Stern and Urbini. He regularly records for the radio and TV. He edited numerous printed scores of Paganini’s works. Particularly interesting in his discography are the recordings of all Heifetz’s arrangements for violin and piano, the six Ysaÿ’s solo violin sonatas, as well as the pieces by Tartini, Respighi and Paganini. He performs on the Mattia Albani violin from the end of the 17th Century. Accordion player Gianluca Littera graduated in viola from the G.B. Martini Conservatory in Bologna, whereupon he studied under Dino Asciola in Rome and got his first post of a professor at the Conservatory of Pesaro. Always interested in the chromatic accordion, Littera eventually raised to fame of a classical master of the instrument. His repertoire covers works of Heitor Villa-Lobos, Darius Milhaud, Gordon Jacob, Ralph Vaugh Williams, William Walton, Luciano Chailly and other relevant authors. He has appeared in many countries in Europe, South America and Asia, also at major festivals, and often in collaboration with the Symphony orchestra of St. Cecilia and I Cameristi Italiani. For Arte Nova B.M.G. he has recorded VillaLobos' Concerto for accordion and orchestra with Spanish O.F.G.C. Orchestra under Adriano Leaper and Duke Ellington's Night Creature with the Orchestra of St. Cecilia under M.W. Chung. A composer as well, he completed his Concerto for bandoneon and orchestra in 1998. Italian violinist, composer and music theoretician Francesco Geminiani (1678-1762), the disciple of A. Corelli and A. Scarlatti, worked as concertmaster in Naples and later become famous violin virtuoso in London. In the middle of the 18th Century he resided in Netherlands and in Paris and spent the last years of his life in Dublin. In his orchestral and chamber works he achieved a successful synthesis of the Italian school. His virtuously developed instrumental complex, based on the Corelli’s inventions, leads through the Naples school directly into the rococo. He mainly composed sonatas and concerts, but did not entirely separate these two music forms. He often introduces rich polyphony into certain movements of his sonatas, yet avoids the dance movements. Using the same theme, he applies a dynamic interchange of the solo and tutti in his Concerto Grosso. His first concerts were dedicated to Corelli; however in 1726 and 1727 he published his two arrangements of his teacher’s sonatas for violin and continuo, Opus 5, in the Concerto Grosso form. The last of them, in D minor, Op. 5, No. 12, known as La Follìa, has a dance theme of the Iberian origin and 23 different variations. In Geminiani’s arrangement, the Corelli’s virtuoso violin part remains almost unchanged, but with a witty addition of the second violin, so that the structure of the entire piece rises like an interesting contrast between the solo and the tutti. Spanish cello virtuoso (one of the greatest in the 19th century) and composer Pablo de Sarasate (1844-1908) found his model in the legendary Nicolò Paganini, and had his last successor in the already mythical Fritz Kreisler. Everything Sarasate composed or arranged (he was world famous for his Gypsy Songs for violin and piano) belongs to the supreme violin shows and opportunities (full of the witty technical inventions) for displaying the performer’s spectacular skill. Yet, this master of the successful saloon miniatures, the attractive pieces of sparking lightness and glow, was also a perfect and deeply sensitive musician, the connoisseur of all finesses of the style. Many of his nowadays still-popular works, including the short piece Capriccio Basco, Op. 24, reveal the spirit and idiom of dance rhythms and melodies from his native country. Distinguished Argentinian guitarist and composer Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) is one of the initiators of the recent (artistic) modelling of tango, a moderate tempo dance, the predecessor of which is considered to be habanera del café, the trendy dance from Cuba (around 1910), but also tango milonga, the folk dance from harbour areas of Montevideo and Buenos Aires. The combination of these dances called tango argentino, tango brasileiro or tango criollo came into European ballrooms in the first half of the 20th century. Tango had by then been considered a lascivious dance, and later, having become more refined, was gradually accepted and acknowledged. The Piazzolla’s music, including his famous Ave Maria wins the hearts of the audiences by an unrepeatable mixture of delirious joy and restrained mourning, the unusual blend of purity and sensuality. His sounds are composed of an equal portion of light and darkness, move and (apparent) rest. The great writer Borges says that many have noticed the erotic but religious nature of Piazzolla’s music. The sentence ”Music is the will and passion” is famous, and nothing expresses the combination of these two components better than Piazzolla’s music. Oscar Wilde writes that music reveals the intimate past we knew nothing of until that moment, and encourages us to mourn the misfortunes that did not happen and the sins we did not commit. Perhaps the Piazzolla’s composing goal is reached when he expresses longing for the past, weeping for what is lost, but also when convincing us that we have always been brave to bear our own and other peoples downfall and to courageously fulfil our obligation of love, faith, honour and duty. Polish violinist and composer Henryk Wieniawski (1835-1880) studied in Lublin with J. Hornziel and S. Serwaczyński, at the Paris Conservatory with J. L. Massart and H. Collet. In 1852 he started a career of a virtuoso who, together with his brother Józef, toured Poland, Russia, Germany, Holland, France, Belgium and England. He moves to St. Petersburg in 1860 and, persuaded by Nikolai Rubinstein – who considered him “the undoubtedly greatest violinist of his time” – becomes violin teacher at the conservatory that Rubinstein founded there in 1862. In 1872 he started a two years tour in the North America and – partially accompanied by Rubinstein – gave 215 concerts in the first eight months. From 1875 to 1877 he lectured at the Bruxelles Conservatory, where one of his students was the later famous violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe. He completed his intensive concert career in 1878, and his poor health afterwards permitted him to perform only a few more concerts; he died after one in Moscow in 1880. His interpretations were the synthesis of virtuoso technique, distinctive temperament an unmistakable feeling for the style nuances; he was famous for his masterful handling of the bow and his left arm technique. His legendary vibrato, according to Fritz Kreisler, reached “un unattainable perfection level.” He composed a series of short, effective pieces both for violin and piano accompaniment. He also composed a collection of violin etudes Ecole moderne and solo cadenzas for the violin concertos by G. B. Viotti (17th and 20th) and L. v. Beethoven. He composed the Variations on a proper theme for his own virtuoso needs; a well thought and elegant alternation of the lyrical and dramatic is completely in the service of utterly individual and easily recognizable style. One of the greatest 20th Century orchestration virtuosos Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) is a supreme representative of the elegance and brilliance of the French spirit. The two main features of Ravel’s idiom are: his natural feeling for the sound movement – which is the reason his scores were often understood in the choreography context – and a strong affinity for the game of colours, which served as inspiration for numerous orchestral arrangements of his refined piano pieces. The most popular among them Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavan for a dead Infanta), composed in 1899, was one of the first composing successes of the young Ravel, who, by a twist of fate or caprice of the jurries, competed four times for the Prix de Rome in vain. When composing this piece of unusual name, Ravel cleverly used an old dance form from the 15th Century turning it into a specific rondo of modal harmonies, in which his obsession with the remote past – later prooved so many times – is reflecting. Composed for the Princess of Polignac, the piece, already during Ravel's life, turned into a cult model of a serious-music hit, which has had numerous various arrangements. The piece ows its constant popularity to the utter simplicity of the melodic-harmonic structure, the unattainably elegant restraint of the rhythmics and expression, a particular undefined gentle-melancholic charge radiating from every measure of this apparently light music, which, like the minimalist projects of the contemporary sound, could theorethically last forever. The composition radiates gentle charm of the dead (or maybe asleep?) maiden, who looks as an unreal image of a chaste heroine from Schuman's Requiem for Mignon. However, Ravel later confessed the character to be imaginary and that his inspiration was in the first place the aliteration of the original title which in French sounds: Pavane pour une infante défunte. The music nevertheless still has a funeral mood. The regular pace of the mourners seem to repeat the prcisely measured distances between the high vaulted columns placed on each side of the arcade. The purity and symetry of the sound seem to invoke the splendour, luxury and grandiose dignity of the other world, the lost royal environment; perhaps it is only a question of time when this great mental concentration will give us back the unattainable nobility of the bygone time. Irish composer, arranger and pianist James Moody (1907-1995), born in Belfast first become known as a skillful pianist-improvisator, who accompanied the silent movie projections. In 1938 he become a solo pianist, accompanist and arranger at the BBC in Belfast. He later leaves for London where he worked as editor on the British radio for fourty years, particlarly popular for his radio series Accent on Rhythm and As You Were. As piano accompanist and music editor he met the famous accordion player Tommy Reilly and dring their long cooperation, thanks to which he himself learned how to play the accordion, composed or arranged numerous popular pieces including many compositions for accordion solo, 22 for accordion and piano, 2 for acordion and strings, 8 for accordion and orchestra and 12 for accordion and other instruments (harp, string quartet and varios chamber ensembles). In some of his particularly attractive pieces Moody skillfully uses the folk elements. Italian composer and cello virtuoso Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) studied the cello in Rome, then worked in his native town of Lucca and played in northern Italy, Vienna and Paris. Between 1769 and 1787 he was engaged as court virtuoso at the Madrid court and as composer of Infant Luis, whereupon he maintained the same title while in the service of Prussian king Friedrich Willhelm II (until 1797) upon whose death Boccherini went back to Spain, living on revision of his own guitar pieces. After a period spent under tutelage of Lucien Bonaparte, he lived a life of scarcity and died in utmost poverty. His output consists of some 400 works for instrumental ensembles that amalgamate baroque and rococo in a masterful way. His melody presents a careful thread in the famous gallant style, while his rhythm is dispersed and ornamented with subtle changes. Boccherini merged all the essential features of the dramatic style with the basic canons of the deeply thought classical expression, giving an enormous share to the development of playing techniques. By skilfully blending the homophonic with polyphonic principles, he greatly improved the structure of the string quartet, and was the first author to write for the then still unknown string quintet (with another cello in the place of double bass), as he began his performing career in a two-cello chamber duo). Written in 1771, Symphony in D minor, Op. 12, No. 4, «Devil's Home», surpasses by much its predecessors of the sort. Like the symponies from Op. 12, 12 and 35 it is dedicated to Boccherini's master, Infant Luis. The symphony is a happy combination of mostly all features of the author: the appealing introduction (Andante sostenuto) announcing the first and the last movement, first blends into a dynamic Allegro assai known from his Snata No. 4 for piano and violin, Op. 5 from 1766. Follows a deeply lived and very personal Andantino con moto besieged by an obstinate staccato. A feather-light, graceful Allegro con moto concludes the piece. This is one of the rare Boccherini's symphonies composed in the minor key, untouched by the then customary Sturm and Drang sound. The piece ows its subtitle to the Gluck's Chaconne from ballet Don Juan composed in 1761, despicting the hell. Bocherini copied almost literally Gluck's description of the descention into the underworld. D. Detoni