Record of the day: Ivan Fedele, “Orchestral Music”

Ivan Fedele
“Orchestral Music” (Cd Stradivarius STR 33650)

One of the few Italian composers whose name frequently appears in concert programs abroad, widely performed by some of the greatest living conductors, Ivan Fedele has developed over the course of a long artistic career his own recognizable language after a few bars in which he has managed to synthesize the experience of the post-war European avant-gardes (inherited from his studies with Franco Donatoni) combining it with a renewed taste for melos and moving between these two aesthetic extremes with a very acute intelligence, also interested in the world of electronics and psychoacoustics.

If Fedele’s early works were marked by the most daring experimentation, in which the Author explored non-traditional performance techniques while also seeking new horizons in terms of formal organization, the works of recent years have seen a more inclusive and relaxed compositional approach (without even the slightest concession to superficiality), characterized by an extraordinary writing ability rich in imagination and artisanal wisdom.
Fedele is one of the best orchestrators of his generation, he knows how to make the orchestra “speak” like few others, avoiding rhetorical banality and effects while continually seeking new coloristic and harmonic combinations. It is certainly not very easy music at first listening but not excessively arduous either, it is enough to reserve for it the same attention and respect that the Author in turn dedicates to those who follow him.

This disc brings together three great orchestral pages composed between 1996 and 2002. “Scena” is the main piece of the collection, composed for the Filarmonica della Scala and inaugurated by Riccardo Muti, here proposed in an excellent performance by the Orchestra Nazionale della Rai conducted by Pascal Rophè. “Scena” is a very moving fresco of ever-changing figures yet held tightly in connection by the coherence of the harmonic fields in which they move.
Fedele’s ability to make the orchestra shine reaches perhaps its maximum splendor in this page, continually surprising the listener with varied inventions that form a real narrative path (within an abstract, never descriptive context) capable of enchanting us through continuous variations, ignitions and relaxations of the orchestral fabric.

Carlo Boccadoro, composer and conductor, was born in Macerata in 1963. He lives and works in Milan. He collaborates with soloists and orchestras in different parts of the world. He is the author of numerous books on musical subjects.

This text is taken from “Lunario della musica: Un disco per ogni giorno dell’anno” published by Einaudi, courtesy of the author and the publisher.