Claude Debussy: Treason, Oriental Influences for Flute & Piano

Born in Messina, Giancarlo Parisi is a flautist, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. After graduating in flute, he devoted himself to the study of flutes and single-reed woodwind instruments and began his career composing and performing music for theatre.

In the 1990s he collaborated in the studio and in concert with leading artists on the Italian music scene, including Fabrizio De André, Mia Martini, PFM and Eugenio Finardi. Through several original projects, including Asteriskos, for which he composed all the music, he has appeared at numerous international folk and world music festivals.

He has taken part in several editions of La Notte della Taranta, collaborating with Stewart Copeland, Vittorio Cosma and Giovanni Sollima. A leading exponent of the Sicilian zampogna a paro, he developed and patented a chromatic version of this traditionally diatonic bagpipe, opening it to previously inaccessible musical languages and possibilities. He composed and performed Concerto No. 1 for chromatic zampogna a paro and orchestra.

With the Italian woodwind maker Rampone & Cazzani, he devised the revival of the saxello. In June 2014 he conceived, developed and patented a new two-timbre flute headjoint, the Zi-Flute by Parisi, produced and marketed by Briccialdi Flute.

Katia Pesti is a pianist and composer from Messina. After graduating in piano, she attended Guido Agosti’s advanced piano course at the Accademia Chigiana. She subsequently studied percussion with Christian Hamouy of Les Percussions de Strasbourg and attended Maurizio Ben Omar’s contemporary music seminars in Bologna. At the Vincenzo Bellini Music Institute in Catania, she studied electronic music with Alessandro Cipriani. She began working as a pianist-composer in the 1990s.

Her encounter with Balinese gamelan in Indonesia sparked a lasting interest in Asian music. She developed a compositional approach in which elements of classical music combine with the timbres of Balinese instruments, which she plays simultaneously with the piano in concert.

In August 2012 she was a finalist in the Franz Liszt Competition for Pianist-Composers, held as part of the Bellagio and Lake Como Festival in collaboration with the Centro di Musica Contemporanea in Milan and the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio. In 2013 she presented her compositions at Teatro Dal Verme in Milan for the new releases of Archivi del XXI Secolo.

Sara Calvanelli is an accordionist, singer and composer whose work connects traditional song, experimental music and free improvisation with writing for theatre, dance and moving images. Based in Tuscany, she has performed in more than ten countries and collaborated with artists across musical traditions.

She graduated from the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan, combining accordion studies with piano, composition and singing. Her research explores the interaction between voice and accordion, bringing together archaic and contemporary sounds through live electronics and bellows instruments of different periods and origins. Her recordings have appeared on Losen Records, Amadeus Arte and Da Vinci Classics; collaborators include Giovanni Sollima, Riccardo Muti and Orchestra Cherubini, and Compagnia Finzi Pasca.

Claude Debussy: (b St Germain-en-Laye, 22 Aug 1862; d Paris, 25 March 1918). French composer. One of the most important musicians of his time, his harmonic innovations had a profound influence on generations of composers. He made a decisive move away from Wagnerism in his only complete opera Pelléas et Mélisande, and in his works for piano and for orchestra he created new genres and revealed a range of timbre and colour which indicated a highly original musical aesthetic.