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The Maestro
Prize is a recognition of the career conferred on musicians that devote
their lives to music.
(2007)
Federico
Incardona
(2006)
Paolo Emilio Carapezza
(2005)
Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi
(2004)
Bruno Canino
(2003)
Eliodoro Sollima
(2002) Salvatore
Cicero
(2001)
Giovanni Perriera
(2000)
Livia Giacchino Paunita
PREMIO
MAESTRO 2007
Federico Incardona (Palermo, 13 May 1958 – 29 March
2006)
He began to work as a self-taught composer in his adolescence. Starting
from 1974 he assiduously attended the Institute of History of Music at
Palermo University: he studied under the guidance of Paolo Emilio Carapezza
and Antonino Titone, who had organized the International Weeks of New
Music in Palermo (1960-68) and edited Collage, a review of new music and
contemporary visual arts (1963-70). His fluid and abundant vein immediately
thickened into shrewd aphorisms: his debut came in 1977 at the Politeama
with Mit höchster Gewalt, composed for the soloists of the Sicilian
Symphony Orchestra.
His formation was grounded not only in history and analysis of music,
from the Greeks to the present, but also on an intense philosophical and
literary culture. After four years of study and silence (during which
he made friends with the composers Sylvano Bussotti, Franco Evangelisti,
Luigi Nono and Camillo Togni and the philosopher Heinz-Klaus Metzger,
who influenced him in various ways) his most fertile season began (1981-89).
At the 1981 Venice Biennial Avec un morne embrassement, a chamber symphony,
brought him to international attention: in it Enzo Restagno admired «the
agglutinated and dark sonority, dense in obscure echoes» and «the
will for song […] toned down by tragic exhaustion».
There followed an impressive series of masterpieces, among which Sweet
may the wind be, for six instruments (Pontino Festival, 1982); Des Freundes
Umnachtung, symphonic dialogues for big orchestra (Venice Biennial, 1985;
Prague Europe Festival, 1993); On distance, for three instruments (Amsterdam
Holland Festival, 1986); Postlude to the nights, for big orchestra (Palermo,
Rome and Milan, 1988); Mehr Licht, on verses by Constantine Cavafy, for
soprano, violin, piano and eleven instruments (Gibellina Orestiadi, 1989;
Warsaw Autumn, 1994); “Malor me bat”. Graffiti from Ockeghem:
for Luigi Nono, for string trio, three blown bottles and crotales (Palermo,
1995).
«The incorporation of eroticism in sound», the composer declared,
«comes about through a fierce rule, which is that of serialism».
In this connection, the source and compositional law of almost all his
mature works was the dodecaphonic series that Webern had planned for Konzert
op. 32 (which his violent death prevented him from writing): he produced
enharmonic series (by quarters of tone) of twenty-four notes, which constitute
the souls of Incardona’s music. These are embodied in tenebrous
and resplendent sonorous bodies of carbon/diamond: in-depth exploration
of the most rigorous radicalism – as the composer himself wrote
of Evangelisti – produces «the unheard-of flash of sound purified
of all hedonism, the ferment of unbelievable mirages with simple structures».
After an eclipse of over five years, his genius revived in his last years,
almost a nova star, with the greatest splendour: his last great symphonic
works sounded out, Per fretum febris for orchestra and choir of children’s
voices (2000), I have asked the dust for orchestra (2002) and The Rest
to the Shades for recorder, double bass and orchestra (2003) at the Politeama
in his city, where he had debuted a quarter of a century before. There
he totally enacted the Socratic intuition pursued by Beethoven and Mahler,
Schönberg and Webern, that music is the supreme form of philosophy:
indeed, in the intense expressionism of his music, the construction is
always at the service of a dialectical discourse that is dense and deep,
but – in his last works – as clear and fluid as the melody
of Bellini.
And he was also a great teacher; under his beneficent influence a generation
of young Sicilian composers formed. His teaching took place at his own
home, but above all at the Institute of History of Music (since 2000 the
Music Section of the Aglaia Department) and at the Faculty of Letters
and Philosophy of the University of Palermo. The manuscripts of his works
are kept in Palermo, at his flat in Via Porta di Castro and in the CIMS
Archive at the Mediateca Comunale (Municipal Media Library) at Palazzo
Ziino: the publishers are Casa Ricordi and RAI Trade.
Paolo Emilio Carapezza***Self-portrait
He was born in Palermo in 1958 [13 May].
Rigorously self-taught, he identifies his linguistic-cognitive pathway
in intense exploration of the works of Mahler and of the Second Vienna
School. In Webern he recognizes not so much the “superstition of
the number” but rather, on the basis of a reading by Maderna and
Nono, the radiant synergy of rigor and emotion, the ethical conclusion
of Romanticism. He sees as fundamental his attendance at the Institute
of History of Music at the University of Palermo and the ensuing friendship
with Paolo Emilio Carapezza, Angelo Faja, Francesco Pennisi, Aldo Clementi,
Antonino Titone, Michele Canzoneri and Aurelio Pes.
He studied both the musical patrimony of the Sicilian Renaissance (Pietro
Vinci, Antonio Il I Verso) and the extreme manifestations of contemporary
ideas on composition: Kagel, Donatoni, Evangelisti, etc. Under the guidance
of Paolo Emilio Carapezza he listened for the first time to Due voci by
Sylvano Bussotti: the work, which was to remain indelibly engraved in
him, was for him a powerful testimony to the possibility of continuing
“to think” in music after Webern.
Between 1975 and 1977 he wrote Memoria for string quartet; Due Lieder
su versi di Kavafis for voice and instruments; and Mit höchster Gewalt
for instrumental ensemble, his first work performed in public. His friendship
with Roberto Pagano, at that time the artistic director of the Sicilian
Symphony Orchestra, also allowed him “to absorb” orchestral
thought “in the field”, thus revealing his peculiar inclination
to consider any organic treatise as part of an exhaustive, utopian, symphonic
“Organon”.
There followed a period of silence and linguistic stasis, due to the impossible
attempt to reconcile the extreme destructive thought of Kagel and the
sublime aphasia of Evangelisti with the red-hot inheritance of the ethical-emotional
“structuralism” of Mahler and Webern, exemplified in a summary
form, in the present, by the works of Bussotti. The meeting first with
the latter, and then with Heinz-Klaus Metzger, was to be decisive for
overcoming the crisis.
Between 1980 and 1981 he wrote Avec un morne embrassement for small orchestra,
performed at the Venice Biennial and published by G. Ricordi & C.
From that moment on he methodically faced exploration of dodecaphonic
thought, which, starting from the study of Fünf Klavierstücke
op. 23 by Schönberg (“Composition with the [12] notes”)
led him to the Webernian series of the incomplete op. 32, a retro-progressive
synthesis of the sonorous space of western music and an occult starting
point for his formulation of a “dynamic” panserialism. Fundamental,
in this respect, was meeting Camillo Togni and studying his works.
In the Favara-Tiby collection of Sicilian folk songs he again found the
Mahlerian ethic of pain not sublimated but objectual: the perception in
corpore of this mental condition in what is left of folk culture and the
reconsideration of the Sicilian Renaissance polyphony that was nurtured
by it led him to think concretely of the possibility of a “very
new” language that, proceeding from Mahler and Webern, was rooted
in the physical depth of the race. Palermo and its quarters, the “lost
voice” of its adolescents, thus became an “experimental centre
of the World”, the privileged laboratory of the temptation of extreme
compression, in the search for a compositional and human procedure that
was really, paraphrasing Kolisch as deciphered by Metzger, “perpetual
tradition as permanent revolution”.
Of great importance were the meetings and friendship with Augusto Vismara,
who was to reveal to him the life and work of Giuseppe Ganduscio, an unknown
theoretician and singer of remote Sicilian melodies; with Roberto Fabbriciani
and Ciro Scarponi, who were to reveal to him in detail the compositional
ideas of the extreme season of Luigi Nono. Meeting the latter and initiation
into the thought of Cage, the psychagogues being Ulrike Brandt and Alfonso
Fratteggiani Bianchi, were to add to certainty a doubt about method that
was at last fertile.
PREMIO
MAESTRO 2006
Paolo Emilio Carapezza
«The
power to communicate with others is Novelli's dominant interest. An exclusive,
morbid interest. The avalanche of material that risks submerging him provokes
the fear of not being able to communicate; hence his drastic gesture:
of the material he uses only the light and colourless foam and bursts
hopelessly into logos, into discourse, into the means of communication
par excellence. He reaches the signs of the alphabet, undoubtedly conventional
but safe: from the discharge opened up there gushes forth now a stream,
now a brook; through excessive heat he can get caught up on a vowel, on
an A, for a terribly long time: but he speaks, he cries. There is no danger
of remaining covered or walled in by that light delicate foam of matter,
or of drowning in it; but it is still possible for others to take no interest,
to be indifferent to what he has to say: and so he excites their curiosity
by half saying things and making people think of great mysteries, hiding
his fragments of sentences to allow people to enjoy finding them, covering
them with that sweet foam, sweet to see, to touch… to eat».
It will have surprised you to realise that to begin this brief tribute
to the famous musicologist and dear friend Paolo Emilio Carapezza, I have
chosen to quote a piece he wrote, devoted not to a musician but to a painter.
But I wanted to show you the vastness of his interests at so young an
age. The fact is that the piece is the most distant in time, among the
published ones, that I know by him. For an exhibition that brought to
Palermo for the first time three great Italian painters, Novelli, Scialoja
and Turcato, and which was inaugurated on 18 March 1961 at the Galleria
Tindari which I directed at that time, Carapezza wrote the presentation
note. He was only 24 years old, having been born in 1937; see how mature
his thought already was and how terse his writing! The year after, on
7 October, in this same room, he was to give a lecture entitled: "The
Constitution of the New Music". The lecture was given in the Third
International New Music Week; Carapezza laid the foundations of his critical
reflection on the music of the second half of the twentieth century, which
he was to develop following the creative pathway of the many great composers
of our time. With the certain gaze and prodigious formal synthesis that
he still has today: just a couple of months ago, perhaps even less, he
did a lecture in Dublin on the Catania musician Aldo Clementi, one of
the greatest living composers, who he had already dealt with speaking
of Informel 3, performed in a concert in that Third Week.
But in February from Rome he had written to me: «I have played Ricercari
by Frescobaldi». Frescobaldi like Clementi: Carapezza considered
at one and the same time, and with the same acumen, the old and the new.
Thus in 1970 he was able to publish with me the last volume of «Collage»,
a journal devoted to music and the visual arts in those years, and the
first one of an enterprise which he had set about on an impulse from our
teacher Luigi Rognoni: the series «Sicilian Renaissance Music».
Already 24 volumes have been published, and at least 24 more should be
published. Big-format volumes, impeccable for academic completeness and
typographic appearance: an imposing monument erected by modern musicological
research in honour of our music of yesterday, with the collaboration of
Italian and overseas researchers and first of all with the precious aid
of the co-editors Maria Antonella Balsano and Giuseppe Collisani. Here
too I could quote not one but many names on which Carapezza's gaze has
fallen, that period having been as rich in music for us as the present
moment: a second Renaissance that he has not only studied and revealed,
but experienced as a protagonist.
And from the 21st century I could go back to well beyond the 16th, to
ancient Greece. However, I will resist the temptation to rattle off data
and dates: if I simply had to read you the list of his publications, I
would go well beyond the time that has allotted to me. However, I cannot
end without mentioning Mozart and the great Da Ponte trilogy, on which
he gives us exemplary studies, now collected in the book Mozart and Da
Ponte. And always, from one apex to the other of western musical culture,
Carapezza's thought has flowed back into academic teaching: a lectio magistralis
that has continued without a break for more than forty years.
Antonino
Titone
PREMIO
MAESTRO 2005
Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi
Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi was born in Rome in 1934, and followed his family
to Palermo after the war. In 1957 he was adopted by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa,
writer of the world-famous novel Il Gattopardo that inspired Luchino Visconti
to direct the homonymous 1963 movie (starring Alain Delon, Burt Lancaster
and Claudia Cardinale, among others). Prince Lampedusa was his distant cousin,
to whom he had been particularly close during the last three years of the
novelist’s life (1954-57). Professor Lanza Tomasi has been the editor
of his literary legacy and has completed the task with the publishing of
his complete works, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Opere, Milan 1995, and
of a biography, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - Una biografia per immagini,
Palermo 1998, followed by a revised edition, I luoghi del Gattopardo, Palermo
2001.
The former director of the Italian cultural Institute of New York, Gioacchino
Lanza Tomasi is a full professor of Music History at the University of Palermo,
and has enjoyed a long association with the major opera houses of Italy
as an artistic administrator. His scholarly work in musicology has focused
primarily on stylistic analysis and reception studies of 19th Century Italian
opera and 20th Century music. In the field of lyric theater he has promoted
the revival of rarely-performed operas and new tendencies in contemporary
musical theater, including commissioning renowned painters and sculptors
for set design rather than traditional set designers.
Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi was one of the first to bring exponents of the American
school to Italy, commissioning Morton Feldman’s Neither to a text
by Samuel Beckett (Rome 1976), and Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s
The Civil Wars (Rome 1983). The artists whom he has commissioned to design
productions for the Rome Opera include Michelangelo Pistoletto (Neither),
Mario Ceroli (Paul Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna, 1977, and Giacomo Puccini’s
La Fanciulla del West, 1979), and Arnaldo Pomodoro (Gioachino Rossini’s
Semiramide, 1982).
In 1970 he was appointed head of music history at the University of Salerno
and in 1980 he became a full professor. Since 1983 he has been a professor
of Music History at the University of Palermo, and until his appointment
in New York he has been Chair of the Education Department. He is Vice-President
of ADUIM (the Italian Association of University Professors of Music).
In 1965 he began his work as a musical manager and gradually became the
artistic administrator of various musical institutions: Rome’s Accademia
Filarmonica (1973-75 and 1988-92), the Teatro Massimo of Palermo (1971-75),
the Teatro dell’Opera of Rome (1976-84), the RAI, Rome Symphonic Orchestra
and Chorus (1984-92) and the Teatro Comunale of Bologna (1992-95). He was
the general director of the Roma Europa Arte e Cultura Foundation, and consultant
on the reconstruction of the Vittorio Emanuele Theater of Messina.
In 1996 he has been appointed Director of the Italian Cultural Institute
in New York. He organized a great Berio revival at Carnegie Hall and many
exhibits of Italian Art at the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, and P.S.1.
Professor Lanza Tomasi left New York in February 2000 at the end of a four
year term with the Italian Foreign Ministry. In February 2001 he was appointed
general manager of Naples’ Teatro di San Carlo.
During the early years of his career he published various works on art history,
specializing in Sicilian architecture, before dedicating himself entirely
to music, research, reviewer and management. He is fluent in English, French
an German.
PREMIO
MAESTRO 2004
Bruno Canino
Bruno Canino was born in Naples on January 2, 1936. He graduated with
a degree in piano and composition from the Conservatorio di Milano. In
1956 and 1958, he won awards at the Bolzano piano competition and won
a similar award in Darmstadt in 1960.
He has played for the most important music societies and festivals in
Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, China, Malaysia, Russia, South
America, New Zealand and Australia. He has performed as part of a piano
duo with Antonio Ballista for the past 50 years and has also been a member
of the chamber music ensemble Trio di Milano, with colleagues Mariana
Sirbu and Rocco Filippini, for the past 30 years.
As a soloist, he has played under conductors such as Maderna, Muti, Abbado,
Chailly, Sawallish, Berio and Boulez as well as with orchestras such as
the New York Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, Santa Cecilia, the
Orchestre National de France, Concertgebouw of Amsterdam and the Filarmonica
della Scala. Bruno Canino has had the honor of giving premiere performances
of compositions by Luciano Berio, Ivan Fedele, Niccolò Castiglioni,
Sylvano Bussotti, Iannis Xenakis, Wolfgang Rihm and Mauricio Kagel.
This internationally renowned pianist has also taught master classes in
Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, France and Switzerland. Additionally, from
1991 to 2002, he conducted piano master classes for the Konservatorium
Für Musik in Bern. He was also Music Section Director of the Venice
Biennale from 1999 to 2001.
A noted composer himself, Bruno Canino has written over 30 musical works,
both published and un-published for soloists, duos, trios and chamber
music ensembles. He has recorded for the RCA, Deutsche Grammophon, Angel
and Orfeo labels. In 1997, he also published a book entitled, Vademecum
of the chamber-music pianist.
PREMIO
MAESTRO 2003
ELIODORO SOLLIMA
Eliodoro Sollima (Marsala 1926, Palermo 2000)
PREMIO
MAESTRO 2002
SALVATORE CICERO (Cefalù
1940, Cefalù 1982)
PREMIO
MAESTRO 2001
GIOVANNI PERRIERA (Palermo, 1923-1988)
PREMIO
MAESTRO 2000
LIVIA GIACCHINO PAUNITA
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