PERFORMING CLASSICS TODAY. CHIGIANA CONFERENCE 2024.

The Role of the Performer in the Actualization of Music. Siena 4-6 December 2024

In the nineteenth century, the progressive affirmation of the concept of the musical work, understood as something complete, intangible and reproducible, gradually eclipsed certain performative and listening practices which involved active mediation with works which were open to multiple interpretations. In comparison to the giant steps of the last fifty years in the field of performance practice of baroque music, and notwithstanding the continuous renewal of methods and forms of extemporaneous creations in the music of the twentieth century, the interpretation of nineteenth-century repertoire lags behind in the activation of real-time performative processes. The necessity to promote a renewed performance practice comes from the need for re-authentication of nineteenth-century repertoire through an analytical awareness not only of its textual forms, but also of the performance practices of the times and the horizons of expectation of our contemporaneity.

Whereas, in the past, interpretive traditions were handed down from teachers to pupils, in the last decades the immediate and seemingly unlimited availability of recordings from different times and circumstances is causing a progressive narrowing of artistic- interpretive choices. Today, the role of the interpreter of classical music is charged with increasing responsibilities towards so-called ‘faithfulness’ to the text and to composers’ intentions on the one hand, and towards the necessity to favour new forms of involvement and interaction with audiences on the other.

The conference aims to promote discussions about the decisions artists make to ‘actualize’ (bring into sound) musical works composed between the sunset of the eighteenth-century aesthetic and the dawn of the avant-garde poetics of the twentieth century, with particular attention to historically informed improvisatory and extemporaneous practices.

A further aim is to incentivise debate between interpreters and musicologists, with the input of musicians who have undertaken artistically significant initiatives, while bringing into dialogue the repertoires of the nineteenth-century with other musical experiences of the current day and the demands and sensibilities of modern audiences.

WEDNESDAY, 4 DECEMBER

Accademia Musicale Chigiana
Palazzo Chigi Saracini, via di Città 89
Salone dei Concerti

 

15.00 – Welcome
Carlo Rossi (Accademia Musicale Chigiana, President)
Nicola Sani (Accademia Musicale Chigiana, Artistic Director)

15.15 – Introductory remarks
Susanna Pasticci (Chigiana Journal Editor-in-Chief, Sapienza Università di Roma)

15.30 – Talk
Performing Classics Today
Special guest: Uri Caine (pianist and composer) in conversation with Stefano Jacoviello

16.30 – Coffee break

17.00 – Keynote 1
John Rink (University of Cambridge) 
Reimagining Chopin: in Pursuit of Alternatives

18:00 – Session 1
The Romantic Virtuoso
Chair – Antonio Cascelli (Maynooth University)

Gilad Rabinovitch (Queens College)
Echoes of Improvisation in Franz Liszt’s B-Minor Sonata

Bobby Mitchell (Conservatorium van Amsterdam)
Playing Schumann Again for the First Time

THURSDAY, 5 DECEMBER

Accademia Musicale Chigiana
Palazzo Chigi Saracini, via di Città 89
Salone dei Concerti

 

10.00 – Roundtable 1
Designing Programs for Twenty-first Century Audiences
Chair: Nicola Sani (Accademia Chigiana di Siena)

Peter de Caluwe (Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie)

Anna Leonardi (Head of Publishing SZ Sugar)

Franco Masotti (Ravenna Festival)

11.30 – Coffee break

12.00 – Session 2
The Language of Improvisation
Chair: Christoph Flamm (Universität Heidelberg)

Claire O’Donnell (Maynooth University)
Vocabulary and Syntax in the Preludes of Tommaso Giordani: Perspectives for Pedagogy and Performance

Gigliola Di Grazia (Hochschule der Künste, Bern)
Le (presunte) improvvisazioni simulate di Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785-1849)


15.00 – Keynote 2
Valerie Goertzen (Loyola University, New Orleans)
Written and Unwritten: Arrangements in Brahms’s Performances

16.00 – Coffee break

16.30 – Session 3
The Interactive Muse Project
Susanna Pasticci (Sapienza Università di Roma)
How We Got into the Reproducibility Canon and Why we Need to Get Out 

Andrea Ravignani (Sapienza Università di Roma, Aarhus University)
The Psychology of Musical Performance and Improvisation

Costantino Mastroprimiano (Conservatorio di Perugia)
L’arte del preludiare

Giorgio Sanguinetti (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”)
The Craft of Partiment

18.15 – The Interactive Muse Concert
Giorgio Sanguinetti, piano
Costantino Mastroprimiano, piano
Lucio Perotti, piano

FRIDAY, 6 DECEMBER

Accademia Musicale Chigiana
Palazzo Chigi Saracini, via di Città 89
Salone dei Concerti

 

9.30 – Session 4

Beyond the Keyboard
Chair: Massimiliano Locanto (Università di Salerno)

Edward Klorman (McGill University)
Bach’s Cello Suites before Pablo Casals: Three Case Studies

Claudia Patanè (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”)
Direzione d’orchestra ed estemporaneità: un tempo per improvvisare

Robert de Bree (Royal Conservatoire The Hague)
Improvised Mono-Thematic Fantasias for Wind Players – Pedagogical Puzzle Pieces in Methods and Repertoire

11.00 – Coffee break

11.30 – Session 5
Interactions
Chair: Francesco Bigoni (Siena Jazz University)

Ludovico Peroni (Siena Jazz)
Interpretazione, estemporizzazione e improvvisazione: per una tassonomia della performance storicamente informata.

Lina Zikra (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris)
Reuse of the 19th-century Classical Piano Repertoire in Pieces Created by duo Jah Poney

Jonathon Crompton (Columbia University)
Hearing Hybridity: Jason Moran’s Version of Brahms’s Intermezzo op. 118, no. 2


15.00 – Session 6
Voices
Chair: Giorgio Sanguinetti (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata)

Claire Burrell-McDonald, Anna Fraser, Neal Peres Da Costa (Queensland Conservatorium of Music, Sydney Conservatorium of Music)
Reimagining the sound world of 18th-century singers using practice-led and extrapolative methods

Francesco Izzo (University of Southampton)
Il canto verdiano oggi (e domani): Note dall’aula e dalla sala prove

Natasha Loges (Hochschule für Musik, Freiburg)
Schubert’s Winterreise and the Aestheticisation of Global Art Song

16.30 – Coffee break

17.00 – Roundtable 2
Interpreting, Communicating and Bring Classics back to the Audience
Chair: Stefano Jacoviello (Accademia Chigiana di Siena, Università di Siena)
Leonardo Damen (Conservatorio “Santa Cecilia” di Roma)
Susanna Franchi (Il giornale della musica)
Anna Scalfaro (Università di Bologna)
Biagio Scuderi (Società del Quartetto di Milano, Università di Milano)
Alessandro Stella (pianist and producer)

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE: Antonio Cascelli, Valerie Goertzen, Stefano Jacoviello, Roe-Min Kok, John Mortensen, Susanna Pasticci, John Rink, Giorgio Sanguinetti.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Angelo Armiento, Antonio Artese, Luigi Casolino, Marica Coppola, Matteo Macinanti, Marta Sabatini, Nicola Sani, Samantha Stout, Giovanni Vai. 

More Info on Chigiana website

IMPROCOMP is a collective project by 

About us