Da Vinci Classics
Achrome Ensemble, Antonella Bini, Camila Salazar Zender, Emanuele Rigamonti, Gabriele Rota, Luca Vanoli, Marcello Parolini, Marco Sorge, Roberto Arnoldi
Physical and Digital Release: 7 February 2020
Achrome Ensemble presents contemporary chamber music by Biscione, Cara and Coggiola, exploring contrasting instrumental voices and approaches to ensemble interaction.
13.67€
Digital programme · 12 tracks
Track timings refer to the digital edition.
Camila Salazar Zender is a Peruvian soprano. She graduated at the Conservatory Giuseppe Verdi of Milan; she studied for three years at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música del Perú, winning the first and only place, under the guidance of Maestro Andrés Santa María and of Josefina Brivio. During these years, she worked together with the Coro Nacional del Perú and the Coro del Conservatorio Nacional in several operatic productions, including Monteverdi’s Orfeo playing the role of Euridice. In 2014 she was at the Conservatory of Milan, while participating in concerts and presentations as a soloist in Peru and Italy. In 2019 she performed in the chamber music season at the Sala Piatti in Bergamo with the Achrome ensemble.
ACHROME Ensemble brings together six musicians committed to modern and contemporary chamber music. Its members began performing together in 2013, with the support of composers Davide Anzaghi, Pieralberto Cattaneo, Simone Fontanelli and Paolo Coggiola. Conducted by Marcello Parolini, the ensemble comprises flautist Antonella Bini, clarinettist Stefano Merighi, violinist Elia Mariani, cellist Emanuele Rigamonti and pianist Gabriele Rota.
Based in Bergamo, the ensemble presents the contemporary music series …e adesso musica! at Sala Piatti, in collaboration with MusicAperta, and organises an international call for scores. Its programmes combine twentieth-century repertoire with new works, including world and Italian premieres developed in close collaboration with composers. Its Da Vinci Classics recordings include Davide Anzaghi’s Chamber Music Works and Music for Dummies, featuring music by Federico Biscione, Alberto Cara and Paolo Coggiola.
Antonella Bini is a flautist and a member of Achrome Ensemble. On Music for Dummies she performs Federico Biscione’s Introduzione e moto perpetuo with pianist Gabriele Rota and participates in the ensemble works.
Emanuele Rigamonti (born 1997) graduated in cello at the age of eighteen, with honours, from the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Como, where he studied with G. Boselli. He also obtained a master’s degree in chamber music with honours and an honourable mention under Federica Valli and Paolo Beschi.
His further training included studies with S. Cerrato and chamber music with the Atos Trio and I. Zats. He has also studied with distinguished musicians including E. Bronzi, A. Scacchi and the Trio di Parma.
He performs in the Trio Rigamonti with his sisters Miriam (piano) and Mariella (violin). His chamber music work has also included the Achrome Ensemble under M. Parolini, the Fantazyas Ensemble under R. Balconi, and the project Moonchild Quartet & Francesco Zago.
Gabriele Rota is a pianist and a member of Achrome Ensemble. Music for Dummies features him as soloist in Alberto Cara’s Concertino, as a chamber partner in works for flute and clarinet, and within the ensemble.
Luca Vanoli is a percussionist. He appears as a guest artist with Achrome Ensemble on Music for Dummies, a recording of contemporary Italian chamber music.
Marcello Parolini is a conductor active in contemporary music. He directs Achrome Ensemble on Music for Dummies, featuring chamber works by Federico Biscione, Alberto Cara and Paolo Coggiola.
Marco Sorge is a clarinettist. On Music for Dummies he performs Paolo Coggiola’s Sull’acqua verde cromo with pianist Gabriele Rota and participates in Achrome Ensemble’s chamber performances.
Roberto Arnoldi is a violinist. He appears as a guest artist with Achrome Ensemble on Music for Dummies, a recording of chamber works by Biscione, Cara and Coggiola.
Alberto Cara was born in Tivoli in 1975. He completed his piano studies with Eugenio Tani, Riccardo Risaliti and Boris Petrushansky, and studied composition with Federico Biscione, Alessandro Cusatelli, Marco Tutino and Luis Bacalov. He has composed symphonic, chamber and operatic works. In 2007, at Marco Tutino’s invitation, he wrote Il colore di Cenerentola, a metropolitan fairy tale in four scenes. The opera was co-produced by Turin’s Teatro Regio and Bologna’s Teatro Comunale, and premiered at the Piccolo Regio Laboratorio in Turin and L’Altrocomunale in Bologna during the 2007–2008 season. In 2009 he composed Gli occhi colore del vino, a monologue for actor and seven instruments, setting his own libretto freely adapted from Book X of Homer’s Odyssey. It was first performed by the I Pomeriggi Musicali ensemble in Milan. His chamber and symphonic works have been performed in Italy and abroad by I Pomeriggi Musicali, the Orchestra da Camera Fiorentina, the Orchestra Sinfonica di Sanremo and the Teatro dell’Opera Giocosa in Savona, and at the Brinkhall Summer Festival in Turku, Finland; the Gaulitanus Festival in Gozo, Malta; the Società dei Concerti G. Barattelli in L’Aquila; Rive Gauche in Turin; Rebus – Occhio al nuovo in Milan; and the International Saxophone Stage in Fermo.
An active arranger and orchestrator, he has re-orchestrated and adapted well-known operas for AsLiCo and the Teatro Sociale di Como to meet the requirements of the theatre and other regional venues. These projects include Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel in 2009, with a reduction of the original score and a metrical revision of the libretto; Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in a reduced version; Verdi’s Nabucco, co-produced in 2010 by the Teatro Sociale di Como and Teatro Regio di Torino; and Verdi’s Aida.
In 2013, Casa Musicale Sonzogno commissioned him to revise and re-orchestrate Francesco d’Avalos’s musical drama Maria di Venosa for the 40th anniversary of the Festival della Valle d’Itria in Martina Franca. In 2018, Da Vinci Classics released his album Symphonic Works, performed by I Pomeriggi Musicali.
Federico Biscione’s music seeks to communicate with audiences while exploring new possibilities. His freely tonal musical language draws equally on contemporary ideas and tradition.
Born in Tivoli in 1965, he earned diplomas in piano, composition and orchestral conducting at the Conservatorio A. Casella in L’Aquila. From 2001 to 2005 he composed music for the Teatro Regio in Turin and the Parco della Musica in Rome. His collaborations have included Milan’s I Pomeriggi Musicali orchestra, for which he wrote Dalla soffitta, winner of first prize in the 2005 Mozart Today national competition, and the Milano Classica chamber orchestra. He has also transcribed and adapted music by other composers, including a version of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte for seven instruments, performed at the Teatro Regio in 2006, and an arrangement of Dvořák’s Four Popular Songs, Op. 73, for string orchestra, prepared for I Pomeriggi Musicali in 2005.
His one-act ballet Il Pifferaio Magico was performed at the Teatro Regio and released by Da Vinci Classics in 2018.
Between 2005 and 2007, Biscione lived in Leipzig. Works written during this period include Verkündigung for soprano and trio, performed in the Thomaskirche, and Mozart. Eine Biographie and Windmühlen, commissioned by the Robert Schumann-Philharmonie in Chemnitz for the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth.
The German public broadcaster Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR) devoted an hour-long programme to his music, including interviews and excerpts from his works. During the same period he attended composition classes for a year at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. At the end of 2009 he moved to Milan and took up a composition teaching post at the Conservatorio Niccolò Piccinni in Bari.
Paolo Coggiola was born in Milan in 1967. He studied with Bruno Bettinelli, Franco Donatoni and Paolo Vaglieri, graduating in composition, choral music and choral conducting. He also holds a degree in law.
He won the 2 Agosto International Composition Competition in Bologna. His works have been performed by the Arena di Verona Orchestra, I Pomeriggi Musicali, the Emilia Romagna Symphony Orchestra Arturo Toscanini, the European Symphony Orchestra and Sentieri Selvaggi, and at the Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte in Montepulciano, Teatro alla Scala in Milan and the Bang on a Can Marathon in New York.
He wrote monographs on Franz Schubert and Claude Debussy, both published by Skira–Corriere della Sera. Sonzogno also published his book on compositional techniques, The Abacus and the Rose. His extensive catalogue of compositions is published by Casa Musicale Sonzogno and Preludio Edizioni.
He teaches composition at the Civica Scuola di Musica Claudio Abbado in Milan.
Federico Biscione Introduzione e moto perpetuo for flute and piano – After a concert at the Conservatory of Trento, in May 2004, the newspaper L’Adige published a review titled “Going beyond postmodernity”. As regards the Introduzione e moto perpetuo, it stated: “In spite of its absolutely traditional language, rich in allusions and references to many figures of the twentieth century, [this piece], by virtue of its extremely balanced formal architecture, provided a moment of absolute aural delight, without falling into a pedantic Neoclassicism”. This is a beautiful sentence, which I…
Federico Biscione
Introduzione e moto perpetuo for flute and piano – After a concert at the Conservatory of Trento, in May 2004, the newspaper L’Adige published a review titled “Going beyond postmodernity”. As regards the Introduzione e moto perpetuo, it stated: “In spite of its absolutely traditional language, rich in allusions and references to many figures of the twentieth century, [this piece], by virtue of its extremely balanced formal architecture, provided a moment of absolute aural delight, without falling into a pedantic Neoclassicism”. This is a beautiful sentence, which I would like to translate as follows: today, after everything and its contrary has already been done in music (“postmodernity”), we are now allowed to use any attitude whatsoever (including a certain Neoclassicism) in order to write good new music; by controlling most exactly the musical narrative (i.e. the architecture), it is possible to reach a delightful, rather than a trivial, result. After so many years, I would not be able to write, once more, a music as ultimately naïve as this; however, I am glad that this piece is now being made available on CD, because here I find a root that has not yet finished nourishing the plant I have become, for good or for bad.
Del 1850, for soprano and ensemble – In summer 2011, while I was on holiday on Lake Como, the deadline was approaching for a composition contest in which I had foolishly decided to take part; the contest aimed at celebrating the 150th anniversary of Italy’s unification. I did not feel like writing a simply encomiastic piece: the history of our country, along with some good things, appeared to me as being also punctuated by greater and lesser misdeeds. However, I saw the birth of our country as the (difficult) transition from adolescence to maturity, as that moment when dream, fantasy and hope are all still possible. Thus I remembered that Nonna Speranza (“Grandmother Hope”) was also the protagonist’s name in a famous poem by Gozzano; by re-reading this celebrated text, I realized that Gozzano’s Decadentism was perfect for describing my feelings about the Italian events. That poem, set at the end of the Risorgimento, cites almost all of the things which defined the Italian cultural identity, i.e. classical literature (Alfieri, Dante), the Settecento vocal music, and “Verdi… Giuseppe”, the greatest representative of Italian opera, whose family name was used as an acronym praising the first King of Italy, cited in turn in the poem as “the young King of Sardinia”. However, everything is immersed in the sad omen of a very long summer dusk – precisely as it was happening in my holiday: in the midst of the secrets between two seventeen-years-old girls, a tragic Goethean Romanticism surfaces (it is not by chance that Nonna Speranza’s friend is named Carlotta). After preparing the lyrics, through opportune cuts, my compositional work proceeded speedily, even though my holidays were sacrificed. I hope that your evaluation of this piece will be more generous than the jury’s, since Del 1850 failed to reach even the second stage of the competition.
Alberto Cara
I wrote the Concertino for Dummies while on holiday. With no other purpose that having some fun.
Perhaps I made a mistake. The mistake of thinking that the things I find amusing should amuse somebody else too. Perhaps, moreover, the piece could have merited the title of Divertimento for Dummies. However, in the end I favoured Concertino: on the one hand, because it mirrors more clearly the piece’s form (a mini-Concerto for piano and ensemble); on the other, because the diminutive suffix (“-ino”), acquires the value of a declaration of poetics. It is the poetics of the weightless, of the easy listening; the head is free from any worries, and the fingers go on, go on…
Of course, listeners undergo a non-negligible stress (naturally; indeed, there is no fun without fatigue): certainly, the “Dummies” are not in the audience! The Dummy is myself, and in my “dumminess” I serenely write things which are so easy to listen to, and yet so hard to play; I enjoy this artifice, like a savage, like a Baroque poet (even a minor one, it’s OK). I aim at taking weight off my discourse. Because in this way I oppose the world, which has too much gravity.
The piece is dedicated to Domenico Scarlatti, who is the joy of human fingers.
4-bis for solo cello is the first tile of a work-in-progress of mine, titled 41-bis. My goal is to write forty-one “short pieces, to be played after obtaining success with more serious music” (this is the subtitle of 4-bis). Leaving irony aside, here sarcasm takes the lead of my imagination. Each of the four pieces targets some of the mannerisms of contemporary music (and in general of contemporary art). Thus, the first piece, Citazionista, has a title which is explicit enough; the second, Modevno, speaks of the wish to “please the young’uns” (though in the meanwhile those “young’uns” have grown old, replaced by other “young’uns”). The third, Mi ha rovinato la Guerra is an annoying piece oscillating between, from the one side, an aesthetics born of the expressionism (the Expressionism’s grand-grand-grand-daughter) and of the language we generally connect to that message, and, from the other, the artificial recovery of a “classical” melodic style. Trendy, the last of the four pieces, assaults us with that feeling of void which generally overcomes us when we accidentally enter an exposition of design (with free admittance).
The readers will ask: do you feel you are above this? Are you perhaps immune from these vices? Of course I am not. I speak of them because I know them well, and I practise them (with the exception of Espressionismo).
Paolo Coggiola
In these times of suffocating isolation, he who (like a modern Don Quixote) still believes in a shared, clear and comforting form of beauty (which is not the philosophical mask of nothingness), has no other choice than to entrust himself to the waves’ surges, attaching a brief message which could reach those who are still free and favorably disposed, hoping that this will generate unforeseen effects. This might be the meaning of Symphony in a Bottle, with its unquiet and still ironic message; last but not least, it would suggest that bottles, in their most sublime function, are made in order to contain fluids of Dionysian wisdom.
Sull’acqua verde cromo, inspired by a beautiful line by the great Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, might be the preceding piece’s corollary, or its inspiring motif; it proposes the total entrusting of oneself to a liquid dimension of existence, to the watery element, which is life in its most intimate natural expression, liberated from human ugliness. Of course, it might also be a fatal attraction; however, I find in this also the most powerful offering of eros, which is, for me, principally nature, with its continuing and wonderfully senseless circle of death and regeneration.
Camila Salazar Zender is a Peruvian soprano. She graduated at the Conservatory Giuseppe Verdi of Milan; she studied for three years at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música del Perú, winning the first and only place, under the guidance of Maestro Andrés Santa María and of Josefina Brivio. During these years, she worked together with the Coro Nacional del Perú and the Coro del Conservatorio Nacional in several operatic productions, including Monteverdi’s Orfeo playing the role of Euridice. In 2014 she was at the Conservatory of Milan, while participating in concerts and presentations as a soloist in Peru and Italy. In 2019 she performed in the chamber music season at the Sala Piatti in Bergamo with the Achrome ensemble.
Album Notes by Federico Biscione, Alberto Cara, Paolo Coggiola
Translation by Chiara Bertoglio
Selected awards, reviews and interviews. Radio broadcasts and podcasts are listed separately below.
Kathodik
Focosi strongly praises the vitality, emotional range and intellectual interest of the music, and Achrome Ensemble’s excellent performances. He highlights the three composers’ different but complementary tonal languages.
Read the review ↗ - KathodikMusica
The official index lists the Biscione, Cara and Coggiola works performed by Achrome Ensemble on p. 90 with four stars. Issue 318, July-August 2020. Full review and reviewer not recovered.
Read the review ↗ - Musica
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