Milano Fin de Siècle

While Milan lacked any prominent figures associated with the cello during the Baroque and Classical periods, from the founding of the Conservatory of Music (1808) the situation has steadily grown for two centuries, right up to the present day. The first cello teacher was Giuseppe Sturioni (second half of the 18th century – post-1826), who, from 1805 to 1842, was also First Cellist at La Scala Theatre, playing under conductor Alessandro Rolla and also working with Vincenzo Lavigna, harpsichord ma estro and Giuseppe Verdi's first teacher. Sturioni's pupil was Vincenzo Merighi (Parma, November 7, 1795 – Milan, September 28, 1849), a highly esteemed performer and teacher, as well as a talented composer. Beside playing in the La Scala Theatre orchestra as first cello (from 1821 to 1848), in 1826 he was appointed teacher at the Conservatory, staying there until his death. Among his numerous students, some who significantly developed the technique, teaching, and literature of the cello are remembered: Leonardo Moja (Milan, 1811 – Turin, 1888), Carlo Alfredo Piatti (Bergamo, 1822, 1901), Isidoro Truffi, (Crema -CR, 1826 – Milan 1884), Guglielmo Quarenghi (Casalmaggiore -CR, 1826 – Milan, 1882), and Alessandro Pezze (Milan, 1835 – London, 1924). Each of them had a highly valuable artistic life, starting with the famous Bergamo – born Piatti, described by Liszt as “the Paganini of the cello” and resident in London for 50 years; Truffi, Sturioni’s successor in the La Scala orchestra from 1843 and a teacher at the Conservatory; Moja, cellist of the Royal Chapel of Savoy in Turin; Pezze, former principal cellist at La Scala and later successor to Piatti at the Royal Academy in London; Quarenghi, principal cellist at La Scala from 1858, successor to Merighi at the Conservatory, and Kapellmeister at the Cathedral. Isidoro Truffi, although born in 1826, is not included because he was the only one of the above – mentioned not to attempt composition.

The year 2026 suggested matching the birth of Guglielmo Quarenghi (1826) with the death, a century later, of his pupil Giuseppe Magrini (1926), linking a dear friend of the latter, the Bolognese cellist Eligio Cremonini, who died in the same year. In 1903, Magrini and Cremonini were the only two members of the commission established by the Municipality of Venice to evaluate the qualifications of five candidates for the chair of cello at the former Liceo Musicale “Benedetto Marcello”; the choice fell on the young Bolognese Ferdinando Frasnedi (1878 -1905), dedicatee of Lorenzo Perosi's Elegia (1902) for cello and piano. The same two friends will be reconvened two years later to nominate the Reggio Emilia native Prospero Montecchi (1863 -1947) following the premature death at just 27 years of age of the unfortunate Frasnedi.

The 1880s saw a major aesthetic shift in the arts, particularly music. Consider the return of Gregorian chant thanks to the Solesmes monks; the beginning of the aesthetic and buildin g transformation of pipe organs; the birth of the gramophone (1887); the graceful taste brought by the Belle Époque, which transformed instrumental music, giving it a more worldly and salon feel compared to the constant paraphrase of the earlier melodrama; the first National Exhibition held in Milan in 1881 also included a major section dedicated to music and housed in the Conservatory. For string instruments, it also provided an opportunity to compare classical and modern violin making and its innovations. The desire for musical renewal manifests itself with the decisive abandonment of the aesthetic canons of nineteenth -century opera and the acquisition of new stylistic parameters that draw from different settings such as operetta, exotic discoveries, light -heartedness, the popular, the paraphrasing of new inventions in music, see the automobile for which Magrini wrote Au rouet [At the wheel].

Guglielmo Quarenghi always expressed himself in the most faithful compositional style of his time; let's not forget that from 1850 onwards he was the protagonist of performances of operas performed at La Scala. The cello thus became the interpreter of the opera, the tenor and conductor of a texture that always recalled the opera stage. Giuseppe Magrini, on the other ha nd, immediately embraced the "new taste" of the Belle Époque, offering us a salon cello capable of captivating the listener with persuasive, descriptive, sometimes frivolous, captivating, and entertaining melodies, not strictly theatrical but almost remini scent of a chalet en plein air, a social gathering place of the period. The five pieces included in this release exemplify the stylistic and aesthetic variety embraced by Magrini, remaining consistent with the desire for renewal described above; the Barcar olle (dedicated to Eligio Cremonini) and the Coquetterie are true gems of expert lightness. The two pieces by Eligio Cremonini demonstrate a different taste from his friend Magrini; on the one hand, they also seek to embrace the intentions of a "new cello, " but on the other, they delicately caress them to express a uniquely personal style, far from conventions yet close to a manifest lyricism.

Matteo Malagoli