BAROCKO
Barocko is a journey through the world of music and its most disparate genres, led by the adventurous and fortunate story of the cello. It is the cello that pilots this phantasmagoric itinerary covering more than four centuries.
The origins of the cello date back to the late 16th century. Initially it was employed only as a harmonic and rhythmical support for the principal part (constituting the so-called continuo). Later it acquired an increasing importance for both performers and composers. By the 18th century, it established its role as a protagonist of the musical world, thanks to extraordinary figures such as those of J. S. Bach (whose Suites are true milestones), A. Vivaldi (who composed dozens of solo works for it) and L. Boccherini, a great composer/interpreter who broadened the cello’s technique and repertoire.
The fact that these excellent composers were interested in the cello was also due to this instrument’s formidable possibilities as concerns sound (the cello is indeed a true miracle of artistic craftmanship and acoustic engineering) and range, which is the widest in the family of the string instruments.
Even though the original musical literature for cello quartet is very scanty, this ensemble is wonderfully suited for performing arrangements of pieces conceived for other sound media thanks to the instrument’s flexibility and characteristics.
The seeming heterogeneity of the pieces we chose actually follows a red thread. The itinerary begins with Vivaldi, one of the protagonists of the Baroque era, conceived (according to the German philosopher Walter Benjamin) as the cradle of modern culture due to its new worldview. It is in fact the moment when ancient certainties started to crumble, paving the way for modern relativism. The musical “seeds” planted in this historical period blossomed in the following centuries, in a variety of forms, and not only in the so-called “cultivated” repertoire.
We therefore passed spontaneously from Vivaldi’s Baroque to Led Zeppelin’s, Queen’s and Metallica’s rock music , touching Tchaikovsky, Piazzolla and Bernstein in passing. These are the many faces of a single great world, to which the cello gave voice. Giovanni Sollima enters naturally in this journey of ours. Similar to many Baroque artists, his figure links the activities of composer and interpreter, opening up unexplored horizons of the cello repertoire.
For this reason, Note Sconte is found at the heart of this journey. It was written by Sollima starting from notes and fragments of musical ideas which Beethoven did not employ in his finished works: this piece represents an ideal bridge between the so-called “cultivated” music and the music of our day.
A. Vivaldi
The Concerto for two cellos and orchestra RV 531 was composed by Vivaldi around 1715, and it is one of the first pieces in which the cello has a soloistic role.
The idea of rethinking Vivaldi’s concerto for our quartet was suggested by the nature of its components, following the founding spirit of the CelloPlayQuartet. This means that there will not be one or two soloists accompanied by the others who play the orchestral parts; rather, everyone participates as a protagonist. The solo parts are distributed among the members and constitute true dialogues; at times these may be lively and almost contrastive, at times they are conciliatory and affectionate, playing on the spatial movements of the musical ideas. All this happens while highlighting the great rhythmic power of Vivaldi’s music: a trait which inspired many composers and rock bands.
P. I. Tchaikovsky
The six miniatures selected here come from the Album for the Youth Op. 39. It is a collection of 24 short piano pieces written in 1878 which earned an immediate success. They soon elicited the composition of numerous arrangements for the most varied ensembles. It is wonderful to note how Tchaikovsky was able to concentrate a great richness of content within pieces of an almost aphoristic length. The variety of nuances obtained out of the key of E-minor is impressive: it sounds melancholic in Winter morning, grotesque and ghostly in Baba Yaga, solemn and dramatic in the longer In the church.
G. Sollima
As concerns Note Sconte, we think it our duty to leave the floor to the composer himself, i.e. Giovanni Sollima.
“One day some years ago (I believe it was in 2015), Mario Brunello called me and told me about a concert he wanted to dedicate to the great Franco Rossi, and in which he was to play in a cello ensemble with his pupils. I accepted [his commission] with great emotion, for a variety of reasons, firstly for an affective motive dating back to my student years: I worked a little on the cello repertoire with Franco Rossi among others, and I will never forget an intense – and also very humorous – lesson on Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata. Secondly, I accepted due to the cello ensemble: it is an ensemble I cherish highly, since I wrote for up to a hundred cellos! Thirdly, it was a spiritual link with Franco Rossi, who dedicated a great part of his life to Beethoven. I focused on the ‘hidden’ Beethoven, the one of the notes he never employed, those which remained at the embryonic stage and which are collected in the beautiful Biamonti catalogue (I may know it by heart, considering that I own it since I was a child). I remember that Mario’s phone call preceded a tour in Australia. During the free days, my mind elaborated a kind of a development for Beethoven’s fragments, which I unconsciously juxtaposed to aboriginal songs and rhythms, along with a recurring thought – the architecture of the Presto from the QuartetOop. 131, which I reconsidered and explored in my own fashion and backwards… Then, in 2017, on the occasion of a reunion of the 100 Cellos in Lucca, my dear friend Filippo Burchietti invited me to listen to a version he had created for his quartet. I found it splendid, since it made me discover new aspects, details and ‘corners’ of the piece.
And here finally comes the first recording for the ensemble I cherish most, the one for ‘solo’ cellos, thanks to my skilled friends of the CelloPlayQuartet”.
The three songs we chose out of the rock repertoire all contain traces of elements unique to the so-called classical music: at times these are very evident, at times they are more hidden.
Queen
Bohemian Rhapsody (1975) by Queen is a piece divided into five sections: Ballad, Guitar solo, Opera, Hard Rock, and Ballad again. This structural complexity is an absolutely unusual fact for a rock piece. Actually, Queen were even discouraged from proposing it as a single piece, because no radio would have broadcast a song of such length (about six minutes). Its ideation is considered to represent a turning point in the musical experimentation begun by the group leader, Freddie Mercury. The explicit references to the world of opera reveal their ambition to break the fences separating the various musical genres, underpinning their points of connection rather than their differences.
Metallica
Nothing Else Matters (1991) by Metallica is structured almost as a Passacaglia in its initial part, which is recalled as a closing section towards the end. It employs few means and has a sobriety which are very close to the “cultivated” repertoire.
Led Zeppelin
The same process is observed also in the beginning section of Stairway to Heaven (1971) by Led Zeppelin. Whilst the pace of the Metallica’s piece remains bound to the initial steps even in the tensest moments, the piece by the Led Zeppelin progressively presses on through the agogic element, up to the great guitar solo unchaining the rock section of the piece. One of the hardest challenges in this arrangement was to render satisfactorily this solo on the cello.
A. Piazzolla
Among those who attempted to merge various musical genres, destroying the boundaries which some critics wanted to remain unsurpassable, Astor Piazzolla deserves a place of honour.
Fuga y misterio, excerpted from his opera Maria de Buenos Aires (1968) is an explicit homage to the great J.S. Bach. It begins as a four-part fugue, written in rigid observance of the canonic rules. However, the mark of the Argentinian composer is palpably felt in the subject’s character. Later, when the fourth voice has completed the exposition of the subject, the theme is projected into an explosion of a porteño rhythm, within which an episode charged with sensuousness and melancholy is found. It has nothing in common with Bach anymore, but it leads us directly to an ideal street of Buenos Aires.
Oblivion, another extremely famous piece taken from the soundtrack for Bellocchio’s Henry IV (1984) leads us back to a touching and fabulous atmosphere, whose fascination is found in its ability to balance painful lightings with sudden retreats.
We finally chose to unite Maria, the famous song by Leonard Bernstein, taken from his masterpiece, West Side Story (1957), with a seemingly very distant piece, such as the theme song of the extremely famous TV series The Simpsons (1989). The interval of augmented fourth constituting the kernel of both pieces connects them with each other in an underground fashion. It is not an analogy one immediately catches, but rather a more secret affinity. It indicates how some great composers (such as Bernstein and Elfman in this case) are able to merge the popular and the cultivated in a supreme harmony, even in their seemingly “lighter” works.