Friday 3 October at 8 p.m.

Teatro alle Tese – Arsenale

Stravinsky / Xenakis / dall’Ongaro / Lachenmann

orchestra

Igor Stravinsky, Variations (Huxley In Memory) (1963/64, 5’)

Iannis Xenakis, Metastaseis (a) for orchestra - original version (1954, 7’)

Michele dall’Ongaro, Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno for piano and orchestra (1991/92, 20’)

Igor Stravinsky, Variations (Huxley In Memory) (1963/64, 5’)

Helmut Lachenmann, Schreiben (2003, 28’) Italian premiere

piano Emanuele Arciuli

conductor Arturo Tamayo

Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI

the concert is offered in partnership with the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI

The concert of the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI, now a traditional presence at the Festival, offers a programme that unusually opens and closes on the notes of the same piece by Stravinsky, Variations. The double execution repeats a habit Stravinsky himself had, but it is also “an experiment in perception” that throws some new light on the piece offering it in two different moments of the same evening.

Performed for the first time on 17 April 1965 in Chicago, Variations, which Stravinsky wrote for a friend who had recently died, Aldous Huxley, is the last composition of a full orchestra to have been written by the octogenarian composer. “Veränderungen – alterations or mutations, the term used by Bach for the Goldberg Variations – could equally be used to describe my Variations, except that I altered or diversified a series rather than a theme or a subject”, declared Stravinsky. Lasting only five minutes but boasting a complex and imposing formal architecture, Variations, “an example of the harmonic use of the dodecaphonic series in conformity with Stravinsky’s highly personal viewpoint” (Andrea Melis), it bears witness to the creative vitality of this great composer.
Between the two Variations, works by composers of different generations will be performed: Xenakis, Lachenmann, and Michele dall’Ongaro.

Among the masters of the last century whose influence is still felt today, Xenakis (1922-2001) is one of those rare composers to indicate a way forward that is as original and autonomous as it is freed of 20th-century European events, summarised in a fusion between music and mathematics. A process of formalisation that is totally anti-sentimentalistic – as wrote one of his famous admirers, Milan Kundera, defining him a “profit of insensibility” – but who produces a music of an extraordinary vitality and dramatic power in which the natural forces that animate and overwhelm the world seem to awaken. An architect (who worked with Le Corbusier), Xenakis was also passionate about philosophy, the ancient Greek classics, atomic physics and electronics, which studies converge in his work as composer.

The piece offered, Metastaseis (a), composed in 1953-54 and performed for the first time at Donaueschingen the following year under the baton of Hans Rosbaud, is Xenakis’ first important work, marking a critical stance towards serial thought. That same year, indeed, in his magazine, Scherchen published an article by the young Greco-French composer, The crisis of serial music, in which Xenakis proposed to make use of compositional processes by modifying instruments from mathematics, geometry, stochastic, probabilistic or architectural calculations. Two versions exist of Metastaseis, founded on the continuous dialectic between stasis and movement: the original one, hard to perform, which will be performed on this occasion, and the second, softer version, which is the one more commonly heard.