From the hypnotic breath of Glass to the restless light of Beethoven, Piovano, FORM and Scolastra give form to an experience in which time does not pass: interrogates us, hurts us, returns us.
By Marialuisa Veneziano
Ravenna, 30 April 2026
I don't know if the music really starts when the first sound comes out of silence. Sometimes, I think, it begins first, much earlier: in a question that accompanies us without which we know to give her name, in a restlessness that seems not to have object, in that dark and sweet present so, entering a concert hall, we not only go to listen to something, but to seek — perhaps without confessing to ourselves — a higher form of presence. You go to a concert bringing with you the noise of the day, tiredness, some thought left in half, a small penalty that you do not see, and then it happens that, gradually, all this is called to collect from a different order, more severe and more merciful. It is then that music does not console in the easy sense of the word; rather, it returns us to ourselves with an intensity that almost moves.
It is with this provision that I have reconsidered the dialogue with Luigi Piovano. Not an interview in the usual sense, not that ordered sequence of questions and answers that often serves more to those who write than to those who read, but a progressive approach to the center of a thought. Piovano does not speak of music as an object to be illustrated. Music, in his words, is never out of him; it passes through you. And this is perhaps what strikes before the content: the naturalness with which technical experience, interpretative intelligence and a rare form of humility gather in one voice. Violoncellist and conductor, for over twenty years the first soloist cello of the Orchestra of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, an artist who has crossed the symphonic, cameristic and solo repertoire with a familiarity conquered in the body before even that in the study, Piovano brings on the podium an uncommon quality: he does not direct "over" the orchestra, but seems to listen from within, as who knows the physical difficulty of the sound
When I proposed to him to read the combination between Philip Glass and Ludwig van Beethoven not as a simple alternation of styles, but as a comparison between two forms of time — on the one hand the cyclical, contemplative time, on the other the dramatic time of becoming — Piovano did not try to reduce, explain, correct. He welcomed that intuition with a phrase that had the value of an open door: «You couldn't express it better». And yet, as he said, he felt that the point was not to find a happy formula. The point was to enter that place where time is no longer chronology, it is no longer measure, it is no longer the indifferent succession of instants, but it becomes substance of experience, living matter of listening. Glass and Beethoven, so far away in history, meet right there: not in the appearance of language, but in a radical question. What happens to man when time stops being something that passes and becomes something that passes through it?
From this question comes the deep meaning of the program. Because a great concert program is never only a choice of songs; it is a form of thought, and sometimes a form of destiny. It could be said that Glass and Beethoven belong to two unconcilable worlds: one to minimalist modernity, to reiterate structures, to hypnotic geometries of the second twentieth century; the other to the heart of the great symphonic tradition, to dialectic tension, to the dramaturgy of form. But it would be too comfortable and therefore insufficient. The history of music is not a museum ordered for separate rooms: it is rather a plot of calls, anticipations, returns, wounds that reopen under other light. And Piovano, with great clarity, lets it be understood when he observes that in Beethoven himself, even where less we would expect it, already lives a force of reiteration, a ability to build worlds through minimal, insistent, necessary cells. Even four hits can become architecture, thought, destiny.
In the Tyrol Concert of Glass, time does not impose itself as a story, but as an environment. He does not lead the listener from one point to another, he does not take it by hand according to the traditional logic of exposure, development, resolution. Instead it surrounds him, wraps him up, tests him. The piano beginning, in the words of Piovano, seems almost to bring with it a Schubertian perfume, as if for a moment a nineteenth-century memory faces the threshold of a modern building. It is a precious suggestion, because it does not serve to "romanticize" Glass, but to recognize how music, even when it seems new, often carries in itself ancient ghosts, remote fingerprints, voices that have not finished talking. Then, however, that initial promise is immediately transformed: the icing logic enters, that sort of oblique smile of repetition, that serious game in which what returns is never really equal to before.
The word "repetition", applied to Glass, is as inevitable as dangerous. Inevitable, because his writing lives of cells that return, of pulsations that insist, of figures that seem to rewrite themselves. Dangerous, because it risks to reduce to mechanism what is instead a transformation of perceptive consciousness. Repetition, in great music, is not poverty of invention: it is spiritual proof. He asks us if we can stay, if we can hear what changes in the minimum, if we know that even what seems identical is altered by the fact of returning. A pain that returns is never the same pain; a memory that returns is never the same memory; a note that returns is never the same note, because we, meanwhile, have changed.
Piovano accurately identifies the most difficult point: the risk that reiteration becomes obsession, and that obsession becomes boring. It is a real risk, and precisely for this artistically fruitful. Glass’s music walks on a margin: on the one hand the trance, on the other the automatism; on the one hand the suspension of time, on the other its mechanical cancellation. The interpreter’s task is to prevent the machine from winning on life. It is not enough to keep time, it is not enough rhythmic cleansing, it is not enough an exact discipline, as indispensable. We need a breath. It is necessary to ensure that precision has blood, that the design has temperature, that the order does not become jealous. Piovano speaks of dynamics, of micro-adjustments, of balances, of those "baptets" that break the regularity and make the listening sober as a heart that for a moment stumbles and then finds its own rhythm.
In this perspective, the FORM — Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana — has had the rare merit of not turning Glass into a device, but to return it flesh, breath, human temperature. It is easy, in a writing based on reiteration, to exchange accuracy for truth; but precision alone is not enough. He can become jealous. It can become surface. Here, instead, a more noble tension has been felt: that of an orchestra capable of keeping together the exactness of the design and the fragility of the living. Each section seemed to listen to the other; each entrance seemed to be born not from automatism, but from a shared need. In this sense, the FORM has not simply accompanied an interpretative path: it has inhabited it, offering to Piovano that living matter without which even the highest idea remains only intention.
Inside this organism, Marco Scolastra's piano did not stand as a separate voice, nor as a narcissistic center of speech. It was rather an internal, thinking, mobile presence: a sound consciousness that crossed the orchestra and was in turn transformed. In the interview, they spoke of a cameristic approach, of a harmony built in proof and sharing; and it is precisely this word — sharing — to remain as a moral key before musical. Because where soloist, orchestra and conductor cease to contend with space and instead begin to breathe it together, music stops being execution and becomes community.
When Beethoven takes the word, it is not a feeling of abandoning Glass, but of seeing the puzzle reflected in a more ancient and dramatic mirror. The Fourth Symphony is often referred to as a luminous bracket between two colossi, the Third and the Fifth; however, this definition, although convenient, is unfair. The Fourth is not minor: it is secret. He does not shout his own greatness, does not raise monuments, does not appear with the flagrant face of the Titanic Beethoven that the tradition, sometimes lazy, has given us. She smiles, says Piovano; but her smile comes from a shadow. And this phrase, in its simplicity, captures the essence of the whole symphony.
The slow introduction, with those dark arches, is not a simple prelude. It's a moral threshold. Music seems to hold its breath, as if before showing it should cross an area of uncertainty. Beethoven, here, does not immediately give us a truth; he educates us to wait. And waiting, in music as in life, is one of the deepest forms of knowledge. Only those who really wait can receive what comes. When the Allegro opens, the light does not erase the shadow: the door with it, transfigures it. And then that smile is not naivety, but conquer; it is not carefree, but grace survives complexity.
In the second movement, the wire with Glass becomes almost palpable. Piovano speaks of a rhythmic reiteration "worthy of minimalism", a pulsation that follows the entire movement and constitutes not an ornament, but a deep structure. Here Beethoven seems to remind us that the return does not only belong to minimalist modernity: it belongs to music itself, and first to life. The heart repeats. The pass repeats. The breath repeats. Seasons repeat. But nothing, in this repetition, is never simply identical. Everything comes back with a difference. Beethoven's greatness lies in transforming this elementary truth into spiritual architecture: what returns does not imprison us, but leads us deeper.
The third movement opens another landscape. Piovano tells it with images of land, almost with affection: a rustic and elegant farmer, a peasant who enters "all arranged", a rural world that is not picturesque, but deeply human. In that description, which may seem mild, there is an important reading. Beethoven is not only the poet of necessity, of struggle, of destiny knocking at the door; he is also the one who knows how to listen to the mint life, the dance, the popular step, the imperfect grace of the daily. His greatness is not in being always sublime, but in knowing that even simplicity can become sublime, if accepted in form.
This is when the Fourth Symphony becomes a lesson against every simplification. Beethoven is not only titanism; it is not only storm. It is also smile, elegance, lightness, restrained irony, smell of tenderness. They rained, speaking of the Beethoven man, recalls the sweetness that appears in the letters, the complexity of a character that cannot be reduced to the cliché of the irascible genius. It is an important step, because the truest musicology does not consist in freezing composers in formulas, but in giving them back the contradiction, that is, life. Beethoven is great not because it is marble, but because in marble it continues to beat a heart.
The final of the Fourth brings this vitality to a dizzying threshold. Writing runs, sparks, asks the bows and breaths an extreme lucidity, and yet it must not become pure virtuosity. Piovano speaks of a sort of oxymoron between the agonistic indication and the metronome, between the "not too much" and a speed that appears as a fucilage; and in this interpretative tension lies one of the most fascinating problems of music: the score is never a corpse to be respected, but a body to be brought back to life. We need fidelity and freedom, humility and decision, respect and risk. Those who direct must be in the midst of these forces without betraying any.
Perhaps this is where the human path of Piovano becomes decisive. His gesture was born from a long custom with sound. He himself, in the interview, leads his direct view to life as an instrumentalist, to the years spent inside the orchestra, to the encounter with masters like Chung and Pappano, to the understanding that music is never an act of command, but an act of shared responsibility. It says a beautiful thing: experience does not prevent mistakes, but it helps to understand that sharing is fundamental. It is a thought that should be written at the entrance of every rehearsal room. Because overall music is not an indistinct democracy, but not even a tyranny of the gesture: it is a strong idea that is offered to others to become common.
And here the artist meets the philosopher, even when he does not claim to be. Piovano speaks of humility and awareness. Humility in front of pages he defines perfect; awareness of having to do everything possible to make them live. It cites the teaching of the Greeks, the necessary imperfection so that the human eye can accept perfection, and recalls a sentence of Giulini: the best can become an enemy of good. In these words there is an ancient wisdom that goes beyond music. Every human work lives in this tension: to seek the maximum knowing that the maximum, if it becomes idolatry, can destroy what we were looking for. Perfection is not sterility; it is measured by the human.
From this point of view, the concert is not entertainment. It is one of the last places where a community accepts to live together time without accelerating it. Piovano says it with words that they have nothing ornamental: after Covid we realized that it is not the same thing to put in front of a screen, even with the best audio apparatus. It is not the same perfume, it is not the same wait, it is not the same after. There is coffee, there is the spritz, there is comment, criticism, even gossip, says with a concreteness that makes smile because it returns to the rite its daily flesh; then the lights lower, enters the orchestra, enters the conductor, and "please there".
This word, prayer, may seem excessive only to those who have never really listened. It is not necessarily religion, but recollection. Of a suspension of the ego. From that moment when a multitude of people, each with their own secret life, agrees to breathe in the same silence. In a world that multiplies sounds and impoverishes listening, the concert is a form of spiritual resistance. It does not distract us from life: it returns us to its depth. It teaches us that being present is still possible; that sharing a non-functional, non-productive time, not immediately spendable, is an almost revolutionary act.
And then Glass and Beethoven, through Piovano, become more than one program: they become a meditation on existence. Glass teaches us that not all that comes back is prison; sometimes the return is the way to go deeper. Beethoven teaches us that becoming is not simple progress; it is a struggle between shadow and light, between weight and grace, between necessity and smile. One expands the time until we lose the measure; the other tends it to make it destiny. But both ask us the same thing: listening not only with the ear, but with that vulnerable area of being in which thought becomes emotion and emotion becomes knowledge.
When the concert ends, the music doesn't really end. Piovano knows. When asked what is left after, he does not offer a rhetorical answer. It says that two elements remain: the pleasure of giving sound to a symphony, and then the other voice, more severe, the one that asks if you could have done better. It is a confession that moves because it is true. Every authentic artist lives in this slit: on the one hand gratitude, on the other the restless. On the one hand the applause, on the other the night in which one rethinks an attack, to an agreement, to a point where everything could be more just, more clear, more necessary.
But perhaps this wound prevents music from becoming a profession only. Who no longer doubts, has already stopped looking. Who, after giving everything, still feels the call of a possible better, keeps his fidelity to beauty intact. And if this tension comes to the public, if someone comes out of the room with more quiet or glossy eyes, if someone can say "this evening I needed it", then the music service turned out. Not because he erased the pain, but because he gave him a form. Not because he solved life, but because for a little while he made it habitable.
In the end, perhaps, the true center of this experience is right here: in listening as an act of humanity. Piovano tells of two girls, an Israeli and an Iranian, sitting close in his row, and imagines that that image should turn the world, because in music certain differences, for a moment, cease to be boundaries. It's not naive. Music does not stop wars, does not erase history, does not absolve man from his faults. But it shows a chance. And sometimes, in the night of the world, a possibility is already a light.
So, thinking about Glass and Beethoven, Scolastra and Filarmonica Marchigiana, the voice of Piovano and that word — Time — that continued to come back as an obstinate theme, it seemed to me that the concert had fulfilled its most discreet miracle: not to amaze, but to deepen. There are music that passes and music that remain; but the most necessary do not simply remain in memory. They stay the way we look after the world. For for an hour, perhaps for a little more, time was not the enemy that consumes us, nor the river that takes us away. It was a house. And inside that house, fragile and bright, we found something we believed lost: the possibility of listening, and therefore of being alive with more truth.
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