Record of the day: Lorenzo Ferrero, “Concerti”

Lorenzo Ferrero
“Concerts” (CD Ricordi CRMCD 1054)

Since his debut as an author, in particular with the works “Rimbaud” (1978) and “Marilyn” (1980), the composer Lorenzo Ferrero has established himself as one of the most controversial personalities on the European musical scene, provoking with his music a very strong controversy divided between detractors and supporters of a language that firmly rejected the dictates of the musical avant-garde in vogue in those years, proposing stylistic points of reference indifferent to the Neue Musik and incorporating elements that harked back to the tradition of melodrama, recovering parameters that were then taboo such as melody, singability, theatricality.

This made Ferrero the main Italian exponent of the postmodern movement in music, and in later works such as “Salvatore Giuliano”, “Charlotte Corday”, “Night” and “Mare nostro” his aesthetic position was further enriched with the inclusion of stylistic elements from the world of pop and rock, but always filtered by a vigilant compositional intelligence, which absolutely avoids pastiche, nostalgia and winks, trying instead to ask precise and unavoidable questions about the future of communication within the contemporary world.

Based on a personal writing method that starts from the series of natural harmonics, Ferrero has developed an immediately recognizable style, where the most disparate suggestions (from veristic opera to funk) that his imagination suggests to him are reviewed in the light of an artistic project that deeply believes in the vitality of theatrical mechanisms and tonality, never embraced in a blatantly nostalgic sense but crossed by restless tremors and shifts in perspective that fully belong to today’s conscience.

This disc proposes Ferrero’s reinterpretation of the concert tradition between soloist and orchestra, seeking a different way, compared to the 19th century, to relate the soloist and the other instruments (in particular in the “Concerto for piano and orchestra”), and proposing in the “Triplo Concerto” the use of forms belonging to classical times through broad temporal architectures and complex developments. The challenge is risky but Ferrero manages to avoid the traps of the obvious by offering us music that is very pleasant to listen to and always able to stimulate curiosity.

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.