Stefano Mainetti: Tempo Altro – Guitar Works (1977–2025)

Description

A guitar, being tuned in a bar / (in a bar in the fog) while, moonless, / a tram still passes across the earth / towards one o’clock at night?

The lines of Giorgio Caproni, one of the leading poetic voices of twentieth-century Italy, capture and fix, in 1946, the night, urban solitude, and the ordinary, patient gesture of the guitarist who brings his instrument into tune “in a bar in the fog”. The echo of the war and its devastation could still be heard, hovering over silent cities, in the dark. And perhaps, in that sound of tightened strings, there surfaced the sudden evocation, yet again, of Annina, his deeply beloved mother, who played the guitar for her own pleasure and for that of her future poet-son.
Caproni, who possessed a genuine and early musical vocation, chose in the post-war years to be a primary school teacher as well as a poet, and for a number of years he taught at a Roman school attended by children from the Monteverde Vecchio district, a secluded, quiet area, distant both from the social whirl, the frenzies of the tourist city, and the habits of the upper bourgeoisie of Parioli. It was a kind of enclosed garden, chosen, significantly, by an élite of non-conformist intellectuals as a place to live. Among those children in Monteverde was Stefano Mainetti, who for an entire five-year span shaped his gaze and lively curiosity under the guidance of his teacher-poet. It is highly likely that this closeness and daily familiarity with the extraordinary figure of Giorgio Caproni had a direct influence on his earliest artistic impulses, given that little Stefano became a guitarist very early on, a very young talent, admired for his gifts and for the dedication he showed in practising his instrument. Later, through rigorous study of harmony and composition, his musical horizon shifted, and his instrument of choice became the orchestra, as is natural for a composer trained in the noble school of former times. The rest is an exemplary story: Stefano Mainetti established himself in the world of music, internationally as well, finding his principal fields of application in narrative audiovisual media (cinema, television) and in the theatre.
The guitar, however, was never abandoned, nor forgotten. Could it have been otherwise? Not for those of our generation (Stefano is my contemporary). Anyone who was young and drew close to music between the mid-1960s and the following decade lived through the instrument’s magical moment in full. Prestige and collective fascination, together with its ready portability, made the guitar one of the frankest symbols of the new youth roaming the world. The phenomenon of its global popularity was cultural and sociological, more than merely musical. In homes, the six-string often began to replace the piano, a presence felt to be cumbersome for its direct association with the musical preferences of earlier generations. The guitar became an object of general, affectionate veneration, both in its traditional form and in its electric transformation, which turned a sensitive, delicate instrument, capable of making itself heard at close range, into the shouting, imperious protagonist of the international rock stage.
Stefano Mainetti’s clear preference for the classical instrument certainly indicates an attraction to its woody nature, its deep resonances, and the elegant simplicity with which the guitar can create intimacy with the listener. Yet the articulations of his creative treatment also reveal certain general features of the composer’s style and musical language, traits readily recognisable in the album you are holding, devoted entirely to the sound, indeed to the many sounds, of the classical guitar. Fifteen pieces alternate here, each with the temporal span of a song. Brief thoughts, then, like the music called upon to comment on the various scenes of a film, and here perhaps one senses the film composer’s habitual engagement with concision and with the rhythm of a sequence, a shot, a frame, before combining different ideas into an organic whole. These are fifteen light, precious compositions, traversed by a light of their own and by a timeless charm, like stones aligned and tightly strung together in an ancient jewel.
What are these pieces made of? The reference to the solid tradition of the classical guitar, particularly Iberian and Latin American, is certainly one constant, and it is testified to even in some of the titles Mainetti chooses for his various album leaves: Habanera para Maria, Todas las mujeres del mundo, Angel, Estrella Quebradiza, Frida Kahlo… Many of these exotic headings are, in fact, declarations of intent, and speak of the composer’s more than close affinity with worlds and cultures of Latin root, not only musical: from traditional South American dances to the sonic abstractions of Nuevo Tango; from Mexican painting to the colours of Brazil; passing through the marvellous deconstructions of Cuban traditional music as they were imagined and proposed for the six-string by the genius of Leo Brouwer, an undisputed totem for anyone who has approached the guitar repertoire of the later twentieth century with love and curiosity. If Stefano’s writing for the guitar conveys and expresses a deliciously “Hispanic” character, his melodic line often speaks in an Italian idiom; and it is precisely in this musical fusion, proceeding by sudden instants, that one finds one of the most characteristic marks of his stylistic originality: an unexpected shift in a milonga step may bring forth a swift melodic flight that calls bel canto to mind, and then, here and there, against the backdrop of a Latin American rhythm, there appears the lightning-like tremor of an aria with a Puccini flavour, always, nonetheless, under the recognisable sign of our contemporaneity, of our present.
Yet it is also the past, especially the personal and professional past, that stirs the composer’s creativity, at a stage of life when it is time for reckonings and recapitulations. In this project Stefano Mainetti seems to entrust himself to the subtle play of reminiscence. A great French philosopher and musician wrote that reminiscence «does not have the weight of memory; it is rather the fleeting touch that brushes past us, often without our knowing it», an ephemeral, instantaneous reactivation of the sense of time that has passed. Thus, from the casket of Stefano’s past, some of his favourite musical ideas re-emerge, among the many that have adorned the films and theatre works for which they were conceived. Here returns the emotion of the birth, several decades ago, of his first grandchild (Lele Lullaby). Here is the tender, moving evocation of two loved ones within his family (Habanera para Maria and Estrella Quebradiza)…
One readily lets oneself go, and one easily grows attached to this sheaf of pieces, traversed by a native and sincere inspiration, not least because what renders them available to listening in such a sumptuous form is the mastery of the performer whom Stefano Mainetti chose to have at his side in this recording project. Flavio Cucchi is one of the most prominent figures of our music on the world stage. A guitar virtuoso, a concert artist of high standing, appreciated internationally (the great Chick Corea dedicated one of his compositions to him), but above all a refined and sensitive interpreter, Cucchi, in this album, went beyond himself, engaging in an extraordinarily close-quarters encounter with the repertoire selected and laid on the table by Mainetti. He came to identify with the deeper reasons for Mainetti’s artistic choices and with his very musical idiom, to the point of wishing to transcribe for guitar, with his own hand, the piece that opens the album (Habanera para Maria), after hearing the composer play it almost absent-mindedly at the piano. Stefano could not have imagined a better travelling companion than Flavio to render his guitar music living and throbbing, and also to share the retrospective, affectionate gaze that such music implies. And, as we know, there is no better condition for music to blossom than the mutual mirroring and reciprocal trust between a composer and an interpreter.
The supportive bond between these two artists reaches its zero degree (or perhaps its tiny short-circuit) in the only piece performed in its entirety by Stefano Mainetti himself on the guitar: Biglietto lasciato prima di non andare via, a title inspired by the near-homonymous poem by Giorgio Caproni contained in the collection Il franco cacciatore. The composer places the piece modestly as the penultimate track, before allowing the five overdubbed guitars of both performers (Flavio and Stefano) to have the last word in the complex sonic architecture of Rendering Revolution, that geometrical mechanism of precision dated 2017, which closes the album with a compositional virtuosity that truly commands admiration.
Stefano’s intimate Biglietto, by contrast, he wrote only a few years ago, at the height of a sharp, painful, sudden crisis wholly unexpected. It is the most personal piece in the entire collection. In the dark, moonless night evoked by Caproni, in the silence of the city shrouded in mist, the composer becomes a guitarist once again and tunes his instrument, then plays, with gentleness, this quiet garland of arpeggios. A calm prevails, a serenity only slightly veiled, which seems to link this page with the others on the disc, were it not for the final arpeggio, harsher, insistent yet brief, almost out of proportion, before the final chord. It is precisely there, in that suspended breath in which everything seems to blur and grow troubled, that there are hidden, or rather glimpsed against the light, in filigree, the reality of a wounded spirit, a sorrowing heart, the passing years.
Riccardo Giagni © 2026