Michele dall’Ongaro (1957), is a composer with a clear, established profile who accompanies a sensibility for sonorous drama with a great versatility (he has worked with Luciano Berio, Gianni Rodari, Vittorio Sermonti, Luca Ronconi, Giorgio Pressburger, Stefano Benni, Michele Serra, Alessandro Baricco, Carlo Cecchi, Daniele and Claudio Abbado) and a curiosity that has seen him involved in musical promotion (in 1978, he was one of the founders of Spettro Sonoro, one of the first Italian groups dedicated to new music, president of Nuova Consonanza, consultant to RomaEuropa Festival, and the author and presenter of numerous television and radio programmes dedicated to New Music). Michele dall’Ongaro’s Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, title of a cantata by Handel, will be performed. The composer declares that from Handel’s work, he took “a rhythmic neuma that runs through the entire composition as a common denominator”. The work is dedicated to the memory of Luigi Nono, evoked like a reminiscence in one of the first works – Polifonica Monodia Ritmica – at the beginning of the composition, while the piano score characterising the entry of the soloist explicitly recalls some moments of... sofferte onde serene….

Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno is the first broad-ranging composition a soloist and orchestra to be written by dall’Ongaro, and was subsequently followed by another six works (with different solo instruments: violin, trio with strings and piano, cello and again the piano).

A pupil of Luigi Nono in Venice (from 1958-1960) and of Stockhausen in Cologne, he came to public and critical notice at the Biennale di Venezia and Darmstadt, Helmut Lachenmann (1935) and expresses a concrete and instrumental concept of music that has continuously refined itself over time, taking on new elements but always retaining the relationship with the past as essential to its poetics, together with the reformulation and renewal of the musical tradition. Thus, Schreiben (2002-03, rev. 2004) is “based on the opening note of the double bass in Wagner’s Das Rheingold, the same E flat major used by Richard Strauss to begin his Eine Alpensymphonie, thereby perhaps unifying three important but very different figures in German music” (Dan Albertson).

A composer of great stature and alien to any concession to the public, Lachenmann enjoys not only the veneration of critics but also ranks of devoted admirers. In his orchestral pieces, he customarily makes use of large groups, including unconventional instruments, such as the electric guitar, the Hammond organ and also table tennis balls and, often, a large number of percussion instruments.

The concert will be conducted by Arturo Tamayo of Madrid. He has conducted some of the most important symphonic orchestras in Europe and been invited to major international festivals (Salzburg, Lucerne, Venice Biennale, Proms…).Tamayo specialises in 20th-century music and has taught it for 20 years at Freiburg, where he graduated in conducting (1976), before training further at Vienna under Witold Rowicki.