Newsletter Quarta Corda
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Quarta Corda Year IX n.1 - february 2006 - Genoa for Paganini - Premio Paganini 2006 - Let me introduce you... Azio Corghi - Pleased to meet you... Syncopations - Q&A Volker Biesenbender - Paganiniana 2005: give youth a chance! - "I voli di Niccolò" by Luca Francesconi - The Paganini for Paganini: Q&A Carla Magnan - After the Premio - Download Quarta Corda Pdf Format (4 Mb) |
Let me introduce you... Azio Corghi
Azio Corghi, who was born in Cirié (near Turin) on 9 March 1937 and trained at the conservatories of Turin and Milan (where he was a pupil of Bruno Bettinelli), has a catalogue that by now embraces a forty-year period, encompassing a series of different seasons in the history of music.
The path he has followed is an original one, often clearly distinct from those pursued by the colleagues of his own generation.
Indeed it is perhaps precisely because of the eccentric, non-organic place he occupies that his work succeeds in absorbing and responding to certain unevadable demands of the contemporary musical experience.
Nor is it very surprising that his production achieved full realisation some thirty years after his first experiences in composition; that is, with the important group of works created around that epochal year of 1989.
For, leaving aside the apprentice pieces of the late Fifties, Corghi began publishing his works in 1963.
In 1966 he won the "Ricordi-RAI" competition with his Intavolature; from "...in fieri" (1969) onwards certain pieces were accorded an international hearing; with Symbola in 1971 he embraced the fundamental medium of electronics; in 1974 he approached the avant-garde theatre with Tactus; in 1977 ballet made its appearance with Actus III; and finally, in 1982 he had his work performed in Paris by the Ensemble Intercontemporain. It was a quarter century, therefore, during which Corghi the composer progressively widened the horizons of his interests, while at the same time continuing to devote energy to his work as a teacher (a series of chairs at the conservatories of Turin, Parma and Milan from 1977 onwards) and musicologist (the critical edition of L' Italiana in Algeri).
With the staging of the opera Gargantua at the Teatro Regio in Turin (1984) a new period of activity began.
Certain premises, long cultivated, finally reached fulfilment and a clearly identifiable mature style emerged within the space of just a few years.
As never before, Corghi assiduously cultivated large-scale forms, to considerable international acclaim.
Without abandoning either his teaching (at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the Accademia Chigiana di Siena) or his chamber music (from the quartet "animi motus" to the refined "a ‘nsunnari..."), he enriched his catalogue with a sequence of theatrical works (seven in twenty years, with other projects in the offing), ballets (sensational titles like Mazapegul and Rossinian Un petit train de plaisir) and huge symphonic or symphonic-choral compositions, the Rapsodia in re (D), La cetra appesa for the 50th anniversary of the Liberation of Italy, La morte di Lazzaro and the very recent De paz e de guerra, both to texts by Saramago).
His catalogue tackles with determination some of the apparent conflicts in music making today, starting with the most prickly of all: the commitment-communication dialectic.
Corghi's treatment of this issue can be viewed as a significant updating.
Transcending the dogma that posits a radical alternative between the politico-social value of an artistic work and its accessibility to a nonengagé public, he instead finds a use for certain tendencies that the musical intelligentsia of the previous decades had branded as inauthentic divertissement and incorporates them within a new communicative message charged with significance.
The act of composition is thus a testimony: an act of ethical responsibility linking the musician to the people of his time.
The theatrical and vocal works, above all, spring from a humanistic commitment to transmitting an "incurable yearning of hope", a "desperate desire for life".
In this task he is admirably assisted by the sheer quality of his literary choices: among them stands out the Nobel prize-winner José Saramago, a prolific investigator of the dramatic opacity of History (the fertile and enduring collaboration between Saramago with Corghi has already spawned six important works, including the two operas Blimunda and Divara).
But another profoundly characteristic feature of Corghi's work is its story-telling vocation, which imparts a narrative quality to his musical writing. This is achieved not only by the continuous recourse to forms such as ballet and the cantata, which offer ample scope for his irrepressible feeling for the theatre, but also by his engagement with the texts of other musicians, poets and prose writers, through which he achieves a dense web of symbolic references that abound in relations, resonances and diffractions of meaning.
Often this involves revisiting the musical tradition, using methods that imitate our current reception of the music of the past.
They are not "innocent" transcriptions, therefore, but quotations embedded in an ironically estranged linguistic context: a modern compositional milieu, just as inevitably modern is our approach to musical memory. Other central features of Corghi's compositional experience are the recourse to the archetypes of popular culture, the refinement of his research into timbre and, finally, a pronounced taste for ludus (displaying the influence of Rossini), responding to the poetics of the divertissement.
In his work the witty, ironic play of intelligence is indissolubly linked with the meditative exploration of the historical and individual destiny of man - two faces of an existential antinomy that his music certainly does not presume to resolve, but nonetheless investigates with great tenacity and passion.
Raffaele Mellace © Casa Ricordi, Milano