The perfect example of complete instrument, test bench and experimental laboratory for every composer, the piano has always been used for experimentation and research, and even when its expressive potential seemed exhausted, it continued – and still continues today – to test the creativity of many composers, participating in full in the evolution of contemporary language.
Maria Grazia Bellocchio, a skilled soloist and a refined interpreter of contemporary music, who has also worked with the Divertimento Ensemble, offers an excursus into the piano production of yesterday and today with works by Thomas Adčs, György Kurtág, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Franco Donatoni and Sandro Gorli.
Built through symmetry, the concert of Maria Grazia Bellocchio alternates the “games” of Kurtág (1926) – Játékok – with Donatoni’s Françoise Variationen and Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke.
The play his music is to play with one of the greatest artificers of 20th-century music, who describes the genesis of his work as being “suggested by the child who forgets himself while he plays, that child for whom the instrument is still a toy”. The “exercises” of Játékok – forgotten scales, rhythms, tempo – immediately involve the sonorous experience, using the keyboard in an absolutely liberating manner. The numerous and brief “games” that Kurtág composed between 1972 and 1993, collected in eight volumes, are an invitation into the pleasure of playing music. Among the pieces chosen by Bellocchio, there is also Hommage ŕ Stockhausen, in echo to the tribute that recurs throughout the Festival to one of the greatest of experimenters.
It is with the keyboard, with the Klavierstücke – originally a long-term project of 21 pieces – that Stockhausen “fixed” the evolution of his language placing them, after the 12th piece, in close relationship with the creation of Licht. Plus, the 14th piece proposed here is the version for piano solo – dedicated to Pierre Boulez for his 60th birthday – which introduces the synthesiser and magnetic tape alongside the piano, and which is drawn from Freitag aus Licht.
For Donatoni too, the piano is an instrument that recurs in his artistic development, underlining some of the most significant phases. The pieces offered in the concert belong to the last period of the composer’s life and bear witness to a renewed expressive freedom, free of that “negative thought” that had instead characterised the first phase.
