Andrea Strappa signs an intense and necessary symphony, while Alessio Allegrini and Human Rights Orchestra show that music can still become consciousness, care and community.
by Marialuisa Veneziano
Lucerne, 28 May 2026
Lucerne, on the evening of 27 May 2026, seemed to hold his breath before even the music began. The lake, outside the KKL, made no noise; yet it was impossible not to hear it. He was there, as are some ancient presences: without speaking, but saying everything. His quiet surface seemed a page not yet written, or perhaps a page already written for centuries, on which man continues to pose his poorest and greatest questions: what does it support us when we lose balance? What saves us when life does not obey us? What remains of beauty, if it does not dare to bend over fragility?
Inside the hall, the audience took place. Each concert begins so, with that small lay liturgy made of contained steps, pasted programs, prudent cough strokes, looks looking for the stage as you look for a promise. Then the lights go down, and the modern man — this creature so busy, so efficient, so persuaded to have in his pocket the world and often unable to dwell his heart — He's finally forced to shut up.
And in silence, sometimes the unexpected happens: music does not entertain. Question.
The concert of the Human Rights Orchestra, directed by Alessio Allegrini, was not only an international event of great prestige. The program, presented by CONCORDIA, gathered at the KKL of Lucerne the Third Piano Concerto of Rachmaninov with Sergei Babayan, the Symphony "From the New World" of Dvořák and a new page of Andrea Strappa, in an evening conceived as a meeting between high music and concrete support for humanitarian projects. CONCORDIA also emphasizes that musicians renounce the compensation for rehearsals and concert, allowing the proceeds of tickets to be destined for beneficial organizations. But there are events that would be almost offensive to tell only by program, interpreters and applause. As if, in front of a wound that found a voice, it was limited to describing the bandage cloth. The chronicle, here, serves; but not enough. One has to wonder what has happened more in depth: what kind of pact has narrowed, that evening, between sound and man.
At the heart of that pact was Alessio Allegrini. Cornista of international fame, Primo Corno of the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and the Mozart Orchestra founded by Claudio Abbado, Allegrini is a rare figure: an interpreter in which virtuosity does not close in its own gloss, but converts into responsibility. He is the founder of the Musicians for Human Rights movement and creator of the Human Rights Orchestra, of which he has been music director since 2010; his social commitment has led him to different parts of the world to support projects that see in music and musical education instruments of civil transformation.
At a time when excellence often risks becoming an altar erected to its name, Allegrini seems to remember a more ancient and uncomfortable truth: talent, when it is authentic, does not demand only admiration; demand for destination. Who needs it? Who's going? What night does he try to risk? The sound, in his hands, is not a luxury to protect under glass, but a lamp to carry where life is more difficult.
The Human Rights Orchestra, founded by him, was born precisely from this vision. It is not a stable orchestra in the ordinary sense, but a musical community that reappears every time around a cause, an urgency, at a margin of the world. Musicians for Human Rights was founded in 2009 by Allegrini along with musicians and humanists active on four continents, with the aim of promoting a culture of human rights and social commitment through music. And this origin is true. The orchestra does not sound like an institution that defends a blason; it sounds like a community that responds to a call. There is nothing amateur, nothing naively "good" in its way of posing: goodness, when it claims to replace quality, often produces disasters with good intentions and bad intonation. The opposite happens here. The ideal does not lighten the rigour: it makes it more necessary. Because if you play for a human cause, you can't play press. Pity, in music, demands precision. It is in this moral architecture that has appeared Immersed in the sound of life, Andrea Strappa's symphony.
And here the article has to take a slower step, almost take off the hat.
Andrea Strappa, a composer and musician from Marche, born in Fermo in 1961, trained at the "Gioachino Rossini" Conservatory in Pesaro, graduating in Piano, Composition and Electronic Music, and graduated from the DAMS in Bologna. His activity interweaves composition, didactics, research on sound and attention to the poetic word and fairy tale; in his works often the relationship between instrumental writing, electronics, literary texts and educational dimension. It's not an accessory. Why Immersed in the sound of life born from this double belonging: compositional rigor and pedagogical tenderness, structure and imagination, technique and care. Strappa does not write how anyone who wants to amaze the world with yet another sound invention; he writes as who knows that every sound, before becoming a form, is an act of listening.
The symphony was born from the project promoted by Allegrini at the swimming pool of the Paralympic Village in Rome, where music accompanies access to water for people with disabilities. In the preparatory interview, Strappa tells that the initial idea was to resume a previous job, but then the need to adhere more intimately to the sense of experience led him to a new score: shorter, more concentrated, more exposed, built around the passage from the initial difficulty to a possible form of well-being.
This is where the concert finally stops being concert and becomes parable.
Water, in the symphony, is not decorative element. It's not scenery, it's not color, it's not that pretty transparency that likes metaphors when they want to make a beautiful figure. It is much more: it is the very matter of the test. It is the place where the body discovers that it is not enough for itself. It is a liquid threshold, a border without door, a lap and together a danger. Those who enter the water must accept a law other than that of the earth. He has to give up something. He has to stop commanding and learn to trust. For this reason, when Strappa speaks of the man "designed" in life, when he recalls the idea of an existence recited without script, when he connects the blow of dishes to the dip and to the entrance of the sounds recorded in the pool, he is not building a nice philosophical comment back: he is revealing the center of the score.
We are like this.
Everyone.
We do not enter life with an instruction booklet. We don't get the part first, then the scene, then the applause. We are thrown in: who with more strength, who with more wounds, who with an obedient body, who with a body who asks more patience every day. And everybody, sooner or later, we get to a board. Let's watch the water. Let's pretend we're not afraid. Then fear looks better than we look at her. The reference to Strappa to Allen Forte's set theory, and in particular to set 9-12, illuminates this choice. It is a sound material that allows the composer to subtract from some historical and cultural codes of musical language, to seek a broader perspective, less bound to harmonic gestures immediately recognizable. In the interview, Strappa speaks of the desire to get rid of "hypercodific" sedimented, taking more abstract and aesthetic rules capable of opening the gaze beyond traditional idioms. The greatness of the symphony lies here: it does not transform fragility into spectacle. He doesn't expose her like a saint. It does not soften it with that emotional molasses that sometimes, under the name of sensitivity, hides only a more elegant form of superficiality. Strappa does not ask for mercy for someone. He's asking for everyone.
The first part of the song moves into a tension zone. Dissonance is not modern ornament, it is not intellectual dampness, it is not a sign with written "attention, contemporary music". It is a spiritual condition. It is the sound of the limit before it finds a language. It's the tremor of the threshold. It is the point where the ear, deprived of the usual tonal house, must learn to breathe in a new space.
Here the musicology becomes destiny.
Because consonance, in the end, is a homeland. She welcomes us because we recognize her. Dissonance is exiled. Not always pain, not always violence; but certainly loss of guidance. Yet there are moments of life where only exile tells the truth. Those who suffer do not live in a higher degree, although some optimists from the living room try desperately to convince him otherwise. Those who are afraid do not proceed by perfect cadences. Those who must enter into a water that frightens him do not feel within themselves a fixed agreement, but an unstable plot, a bump, a question.
Strappa does not solve this question immediately. It lets her vibrate.
And this is where the thrill is born. Not pathetic, but actually.
Because nothing moves more deeply than an un tamed truth. Dissonance, in his symphony, is not the evil to be erased. It's a room to cross. It is the sound form of fear when it still cannot become courage. It is cold water on the chest. It is that second, infinite medium, in which the body is no longer on the edge and is not yet supported by water.
Then enter the real sounds of the pool.
Rumors, fragments, environmental traces, materials recorded during the experience at the Paralympic Village. Strappa explains that he has not treated them as a simple document or as a superimposed effect, but as sound bodies to filter, rework and integrate with the orchestra. The sounds of real life are placed next to the classical instruments, looking for a compnetration and not a cold juxtaposition.
It's a very powerful gesture.
Because at that moment the concert hall, with all its nobility, must make room for the world. The noise of the water, which in another circumstance would remain outside, enters between violins, breaths, brass, percussions. It doesn't fit like intruder. Enter as a witness.
And then we understand that music does not have the task of making suffering beautiful. It would be obscene. Rather, it has the task of preventing suffering from changing. To give her a fairly broad form so she can be looked at without shame. To turn the noise into listening, without erasing its roughness.
From Pierre Schaeffer onwards, the twentieth century taught that concrete sound can become musical material. But in tearing this inheritance does not taste the closed laboratory, the technical test, the experiment that welcomes its novelty. Here the concrete sound is really concrete: not because recorded, but because it brings life on. It is water crossed by bodies. It is noise inhabited by fears. It is acoustic matter that keeps the heat of the human.
And then there is technology.
Here too, Strappa falls neither in nostalgia nor in fetishism. He does not reject the technique as a frightened humanism would, but he does not love it as some modernity without soul. In the interview he reflects on technique as an extension of the human body, from McLuhan to computer science, and insists on the need for it to remain subordinate to the subject, to care, to the sensitivity of the living. The technique looks at the object and the performance; humanism looks at the face, joy, suffering and the creature we have next to.
This is one of the most profound philosophical keys of the work.
We live in an age that can multiply the means and lose the ends. We have instruments to record every vibration and we often no longer know how to listen to a voice. We know how to amplify the sound and tacit the man. We can build wonderful machines and then use them to become more alone. In Immersed in the sound of lifeHowever, electronics do not move away from the human: it approaches it. The digital filter becomes a lens of piety. The touchscreen is not a gadget, but a hand that touches the water. Technology does not dominate; accompany.
This is where the vision of Strappa encounters deeply that of Allegrini. Both, each in their role, seem to say the same thing: the greatness does not consist in overcoming, but in serving. The orchestra serves the cause; the technique serves the sound; the sound serves man; and the man, if he has learned something, serves what is more fragile than him.
In the second part of the symphony, matter opens to an unexpected memory: Gianni Rodari. Strappa recovers a melody composed in 2020 on The clock, the philanthropist of the artisan who repairs watches with the care of a doctor, to return to people "the most beautiful time in the world". In the interview, the composer connects this image to the theme of care and the will to offer still good moments to live.
And here’s how water becomes time.
Time is the other great pool where we are all immersed. No one has chosen to enter, no one really knows when it comes out, and yet we all learn, more or less awkwardly, to move. Some swim with apparent safety; others drown; others still wait a hand. The time of the healthy and the time of the sick does not flow in the same way. The time of those who are afraid is not the time of those who look outside. The time of a fragile body can become very slow, almost immobile, like a hand that no longer dares to continue.
Strappa speaks of a dreamy, inner, non-chronological time, made of crescendi, diminuendi, deep dynamisms that are not always allowed to be translated into words. And in fact his music does not proceed as a clock, but as a conscience. Don't measure: remember. It doesn't matter. It does not run towards the end: it seeks a more human way to last.
The watchmaker of Rodari then becomes a secret figure of the composer.
Strap does not repair time mechanically. Repair our relationship with it.
He doesn't return what we lost. No music can do it, and we also distrust those who promise it with too much security: they usually want to sell us something, or a ticket or an illusion. But music can make a more discreet miracle. It can make time not only what consumes us, but also what collects us. It can transform life into experience, pain in shape, fear in breath.
That's why Immersed in the sound of life commuove: because he does not cry for us. He walks us where we are afraid to cry.
It's not consoling music. It's compassionate music.
And the difference is huge.
The consolation, when it is easy, puts a blanket over the pain and invites everyone to look elsewhere. Compassion, instead, sits next. He doesn't want to understand everything, he doesn't talk too long, he doesn't distribute solutions like candy. Stay. Breathe together. And in that remain there is already a form of salvation.
The evening programme amplified this reading. Rachmaninov, with the Third Concert, represented the romantic subject pushed to the limit of his own possibilities: the piano as a titanic, confessional and vertiginous body; the technique as abyss and not as a performance. Dvořák, with the Symphony "From the New World", opened instead the space of the other, of nostalgia, of the sought horizon. Among these two monuments, the symphony of Strappa posed a more silent and radical question: what new world can we desire, if we do not know how to listen to the fragile world we have before?
It's a question to shake.
Because human rights, in the end, begin long before solemn documents, statements, protocols, signatures. They start when someone decides that the fatigue of the other is about it. When the limit of others is not looked at as a distance, but as a call. When fragility is not born, but recognized as part of our own condition.
The Human Rights Orchestra, that evening, gave form to this sound. He didn't preach. He played. And he did well, because music, when he begins to preach too much, risks becoming a preacher with bows: what from which even the saints, probably, would ask for leave. But when you let the sound think, then you can get where the speech stops.
In the end, after the last orchestral breath, it was not only the memory of a concert. There was some kind of tremor. That subtle vibration that arises when something, within us, was touched without being violated. As if the music had opened a door in a room we had long closed.
Allegrini, with the Human Rights Orchestra, showed that excellence can still have a conscience.
Strap, with Immersed in the sound of life, he showed that contemporary composition can still have a heart without losing intelligence, and can have intelligence without draining the heart.
This is rare.
And when it happens, you have to say it with gratitude.
Music doesn't always save. It would be false, and perhaps even cruel, to say it. It does not erase the disease, it does not dissolve all fear, it does not put back all the hands, it does not return all the bodies to lightness. But it can do something that, at certain times, resembles a lot of salvation: it can prevent the fragility of feeling alone.
He gives her a voice.
It gives her a form.
Takes her a breath.
And then the man, who had entered the hall as a spectator, comes out a little less viewer of life. He listened to the water, and perhaps he recognized his own. He listened to dissonance, and maybe he stopped embarrassing. He listened to the time, and maybe he understood that even a wounded time can still sing.
That evening, at the KKL in Lucerne, music was not celebrated.
His highest chance was celebrated: to become pity without weakness, thought without coldness, beauty without vanity.
An orchestra played.
A composer opened a wound and transformed it into form.
A director has collected many lives in one breath.
And for a few minutes — few, precious, irreparable — the world did not seem healed.
But listen.
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