On Friday evening, 18 November from 5:30 PM until almost midnight on Sunday, 20 November, the Villa Aurelia and Sala Aurelia were once again the locus for the Roman new music festival called Nuova Consonanza, in this case curated by Fausto Sebastiani in its 48th edition, and entitled Rimodulazione (Remodulation). For many years now the American Academy in Rome has benefited from this collaboration, which reliably brings a large contingent of Rome's avid and intelligent new music audience to the Janiculum. Friday night was no exception: a capacity crowd gathered in the Sala Aurelia to hear the Quartetto Prometeo, one of Italy's most distinguished young string quartets, deliver authoritative performances of John Cage's 1950 String Quartet In Four Parts, Italian composer Ivan Fedele's 2006-7 Quartetto No. 4 "Palimpsest," and Steve Reich's 1988 Different Trains.
Arts Advisor and composer Richard Trythall (FAAR, RAAR), whose crucial work as liaison made the festival possible, remarked that the Cage was "like diatonic Webern" or, better, "like a Calder mobile-- objects float by without emotional glue holding them together." To be sure, the overall mood of the Cage was calm, even meditative, as suggested by the titles of the four parts: "Quietly Flowing Along," "Slowly Rocking," "Nearly Stationary," and "Quodlibet." The Ivan Fedele piece was also highly effective, in its exploration of the sound spectrum. In Steve Reich's quartet, the instruments repeatedly derived their rhythmical and tonal material from spoken words and phrases that themselves addressed momentous events in 20th century history, including the Holocaust, and the movement names convey this historical sense: "America-Before the War"/"Europe- During the War"/"After the War." For encores, the Quartetto Prometeo offered transcriptions by Italian contrabass soloist and composer Stefano Scodanibbio of South American songs.
The first resource on offer at the Sunday Nuova Consonanza marathon was in fact not a musical one at all: capitalizing on the sesquicentenary anniversary of the foundation of the Italian Republic, the festival invited guests to visit the Museo della Repubblica Romana della memoria garibaldina in the nearby Porta San Pancrazio, where interactive displays and a son et lumiere installation tell the story of Garibaldi's heroic resistance against the French on the Janiculum in the spring and early summer of 1849. The Sunday festival actually started an hour later than advertised, because of a city-wide daytime ban on vehicular traffic (a response to high smog levels), but crowds materialized on Sunday evening just the same.
At 6 PM, amid the gilt walls and cut-crystal chandeliers of the Sala Musica in the Villa Aurelia, Marcello Guarnacci presented a program entitled Fisarmonica oggi (Accordion Today) in which he explored, to excellent effect, the considerable resources of an instrument that has been of particular interest to Italian composers in recent years. Pieces by Federica Clementi (clarinet), Emilia Parada Cabaleiro (alto sax), and Domenico Turi (clarinet) highlighted the accordion with one other instrument; Marco Valerio Antonini's Vento d'Autunno (Autumn Wind) of 2010 (very like Brahms, if Brahms had written for accordion) added a cello to the accordion and clarinet, and Martina Colli's Mind the Gap (2010) built the ensemble to accordion, alto and tenor sax, and cello, before Guarnacci concluded the program with two solo accordion pieces, Alessandro Severa's 2010 Suite and Alessandro Sbordoni's 2007 Meine Freude. Composers Turi, Antonini and Sbordoni were all on hand for these performances of their work.
It was the portion of the program entitled "Focus Italia-USA" that highlighted the work of current Samuel Barber Rome Prize winner Sean Friar and Elliott Carter Rome Prize winner Lei Liang. The program opened with two pieces by Italian composer Franco Mirenzi, which were followed by Friar's very demanding Elastic Loops (2007) for solo piano, executed competently by Marco Marzocchi. Friar's Short Winds (2011), originally for wind quartet but transcribed here for the first time for saxophone quartet, was delightfully brash and seductive, with its provocatively-titled sections "Wiggle Room" and "Lick Machine." Alessandra Ciccaglioni's 2011 Almanacco di un mondo semplice (Almanac of a Simple World) so aggressively explored the dissonances available to the saxophone quartet that some audience members were observed with their fingers in their ears. Lei Liang's Yuan (2008), like Elastic Loops heard in its Italian premiere, placed almost unimaginable technical demands on the four saxophonists, including using the keys and pads of the instrument as sources of percussion and vocalizing with the mouthpiece alone, all in the service of adumbrating a tale from the Chinese Cultural Revolution of a woman who wails like a ghost and dies of grief after her husband's murder. (In the Chinese syllable yuan are found the roots of the words for "injustice," "lamentation" and "prayer.") American Academy in Rome community members were out in force to hear the work of their colleagues.
More events followed, this time in the Sala Aurelia, including the evening's largest work, entitled I Risorgimenti Sconcertanti (Stupefying Revolutions), an uncategorizable performance incorporating elements of spoken word (melodrama), operetta, and cabaret, and exploring both the Risorgimento and its legacy in contemporary Italy in partly-ironic, partly-elegiac terms. This performance referred back to the Porta San Pancrazio museum visit with which the audience had begun the evening. The work employed the combined forces of a narrator, a soprano and baritone from the Santa Cecilia Opera Studio, together with eight instruments, and featured the world premieres of music composed for the occasion by Ada Gentile, Lucio Gregoretti, Fabrizo De Rossi Re, and Giovanni Guaccero. The Italian audience followed the program closely all the way to its last line: Avanti va la storia, bella o brutta che sia (History goes forward, whether it is beautiful or ugly). The final event of the evening, once again connected with the Risorgimento, was a projection of the 1909 Mario Caserini silent film Il Piccolo Garibaldino (The Little Garibaldi Volunteer) with an electroacoustic sound-score by the ensemble HEKA, which worked brilliantly to somehow return to drama the extreme melodrama of the young boy who dies on the battlefield at his father's side.
As part of the American Academy's ongoing effort, both to open its doors to the Rome arts community and to integrate the work of its Fellows into that community, Nuova Consonanza is an ambitious and lively annual collaboration. In its 48th edition, it also included three new works in papier-mache by current Harold M English/Jacob H. Lazarus-Metropolitan Museum of Arts Rome Prize winner Jenny Snider: Leaves, Leaf and Found, the latter a powerful allusion to the sculptures on the inside of the Arch of Titus in the Forum depicting the sack of the Temple in Jerusalem.