The Apeiron Armonies

Category: Sunday listening

  • Rachmaninoff: when the heart returns from silence

    Listening today: Concerto n°2 in Do minor op.18, S. Rachmaninov

    Sunday listening — Listening to take you in

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    Before you start music

    Also this Sunday the proposal came from our reader.

    Sergei Rachmaninoff's Second Piano and Orchestra Concerto.

    There are pages for which you need to prepare your ear. For this, perhaps, you have to prepare something else.

    Because Concerto No. 2 in D minor op. 18 does not just ask to be heard. He asks to be crossed.

    We must accept its exaggerations, its immense melodic arches, its shadows, its sudden openings; we must allow Rachmaninoff something that we today give with some difficulty to artists: be sentimental without being superficial, passionate without shame, vulnerable without turning vulnerability into weakness.

    We are in Russia between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tchaikovsky has been dead for a few years. A generation of musicians inherited from him not a way, but almost a question: how far can life enter the musical form without destroying it?

    Rachmaninoff will give one of the most powerful answers.

    But before you get there, you have to cross the silence.

    The man who could no longer compose

    In March 1897 Rachmaninoff was twenty-three years old and assisted in St. Petersburg at the first performance of his First Symphony.

    He is convinced that the score can consecrate him.

    It happens otherwise.

    The execution is problematic, the harsh welcome, the fierce criticism. The young composer is devastated. Years later she will remember that evening as an experience that had left it deeply changed. For about three years his compositional activity is drastically reduced: he continues to direct, play, work, but what he first seemed natural — sit down and create music — becomes terribly difficult.

    Perhaps this is one of the most atrocious fears for an artist.

    Don't lose success.

    Losing access to yourself.

    Have your hands again, know the craft again, continue to hear music in others and wonder whether that source that once existed within us has dried up.

    In 1899 Rachmaninoff promises a new piano concert, but fails to write it. Pressure increases. At the beginning of 1900 he was persuaded to contact the doctor Nikolai Dahl, psychiatrist and passionate amateur musician. From January to April he meets him daily. Dahl also uses hypnotic and suggestive techniques, working on sleep, mood, trust and above all on the possibility that Rachmaninoff returns to compose. The musician will later remember that the treatment really helped him and that, with the arrival of summer, the ideas began to move again.

    And here we have to stop.

    Because we already know the ending of history and are tempted to turn it into a fairy tale.

    The doctor treats the composer. The composer heals. The masterpiece is born.

    No.

    Life is not so neat.

    Rachmaninoff does not enter Dahl's studio without music and comes out with the Second Concerto under his arm.

    Something much more human.

    He slowly began to believe he could still write.

    And it's different.

    The first victory was not the Concerto.

    Maybe it was a joke.

    Then another.

    Then the feeling, forgotten for a long time, that from a sentence could arise a second one.

    During the summer of 1900 the second and third movement are completed. Rachmaninoff runs them in Moscow in December and gets a huge success. Only then will he write the first movement. The full concert debuted in November 1901 with him on the piano and Aleksandr Siloti on the podium. The score carries a simple and immense dedication in its meaning:

    To Nikolaj Dahl.

    Not the doctor who healed me.

    To him who, at a precise moment of his life, had contributed to give him a chance.

    The one to start over.

    🎧 Open listening. Then he keeps reading

    Before starting the concert, forget for a moment his celebrity.

    Forget the films that used the melodies, the legendary engravings, the pianists who turned it into an almost initiatory test of the great repertoire.

    Just imagine a man in front of a piano.

    For a long time he doubted he could still compose.

    Now lay your hands on the keyboard.

    And the concert begins.

    the Concerto n°2 in Do minor op.18 by S. Rachmaninov (click on the black arrow to make the listening appear)

    Inside the score

    It doesn't start with a melody. Start with a heartbeat.

    In the first jokes Rachmaninoff does something brilliant.

    He doesn't give us one of his great themes.

    It makes us wait.

    The piano plays a succession of chords, more and more full and stronger.

    Many have heard in those sounds a call to Russian bells, an acoustic universe that will deeply cross the imagination of Rachmaninoff. The pianist and composer Nikolaj Medtner also associated the opening of the Concert with a Russia that seems to emerge progressively in front of the listener.

    But we leave Russia for a moment.

    Let's just listen to them as a sound.

    A deal.

    Then another.

    Again.

    More and stronger.

    It is difficult to know the history of composition and not feel something almost physical in this gesture.

    Like when, after a long time left, we try to get up.

    First time we don't run.

    Let's check if the legs hold us.

    And these agreements seem to do this.

    Are you there?

    Again.

    You still there?

    Again.

    Then the orchestra enters.

    And finally the music walks.

    I. Moderate

    The piano opens the door. But the orchestra is talking.

    When the strings put the first theme in a minor, the piano does not appropriate.

    This detail is wonderful.

    Rachmaninoff was one of the greatest pianists of his time. He had prodigious hands, formidable technique and a full keyboard available to present himself to the world with a spectacular gesture.

    He does something else.

    Let the others sing.

    The piano accompanies the orchestral theme with great figurations flowing under the melody. He is present everywhere, but does not claim to be the main voice.

    Almost that the first gesture of a man returned to the composition was not shouting «Here I am», but listen.

    Musically, the effect is extraordinary: the melody of the arches seems to advance over an incessant current. The surface sings; below, something keeps moving.

    And it's already Rachmaninoff.

    Because in his music almost never a feeling is one thing.

    Under serenity there may be restlessness.

    Inside a bright melody survives a note that hurts.

    At the moment of maximum expansion there is often something that is not resolved completely.

    This is perhaps the reason why his melodies, even when they are sumptuous, they never seem happy.

    Remember.

    Then comes the second big theme.

    And here the world changes.

    The piano finally sings.

    It's not a nice little phrase; it's one of those melodies that in Rachmaninoff seem to need a huge space to be able to breathe. They rise up, fall back, continually delay where we thought they would come.

    This is one of the most profoundly human features of his writing.

    Rachmaninoff knows the power ofharmonic waiting.

    He could take us home right away.

    He doesn't.

    Recommend the resolution.

    Puts in a tension.

    It extends a note.

    Makes the sentence deviate.

    And just when we start desperately want that melody to finally find a place to settle, it allows it to get there.

    The emotion is also born of this.

    Not from the note that comes, but from all the time we waited for it.

    Is it so far from life?

    How many things become valuable not for what they are, but how much did we have to wait for them?

    🎧 Listen to this.

    Listen to the beginning and observe the relationship between piano and orchestra.

    First the piano builds the space.

    Then the orchestra sings.

    Later it will be the piano to receive the great opera melody.

    There is no dominating protagonist and an orchestra that obeys.

    There is an exchange.

    One argues while the other speaks.

    Then they reverse.

    And suddenly this huge virtuoso concert tells us something very simple:

    even a very strong voice, sometimes, needs to be supported.

    Development brings music to increasingly tormented regions.

    The ideas we knew are broken, accelerated, pushed against each other. The orchestra grows; the piano becomes more and more physical. There comes a moment when it seems that the whole structure cannot contain the accumulated energy.

    And then the initial theme returns with a huge force.

    It is no longer the melody we had met at the beginning.

    Notes can be recognizable, but we are no longer at the same point.

    We went through something.

    It is the great capacity of Romanticism: to make us understand that Returning does not mean turning back.

    A melody heard after a storm is no longer the same melody.

    Like a house in which we return after many years.

    The door is identical.

    We don't.

    II. Adagio supported

    Now let him breathe.

    After the tension of the first movement, Rachmaninoff makes one of the most beautiful light changes in the entire repertoire.

    Let's go in I'm getting better..

    The piano slowly has its harping.

    And above this plot the orchestra's voices begin to emerge: first the flute, then especially the clarinet, which lets appear one of the most intimate melodies of the Concerto.

    Almost nothing happens here.

    And everything happens.

    The piano accompanies.

    Harpeggi keep coming back.

    They don't ask attention.

    They don't want to amaze us.

    They create a place.

    It’s like when someone still can’t tell what happened to him and another person stays next to him without obliging him to speak.

    This, for me, is one of the most human moments of the entire score.

    The piano can wait.

    Then he takes the melody.

    And when he does, we realize that Rachmaninoff is not simply composing a "theme of love".

    That label would be too small.

    Inside this music there is desire, of course. There is tenderness. But there is also something much more difficult to define: the feeling of a happiness that knows to be fragile.

    The melody goes up.

    Sounds like something.

    He almost comes to the point of confessing.

    Then he comes back.

    Take courage.

    Come back.

    This is where harmony and psychology become the same.

    Harmonic tensions prevent the phrase from resting too early; modulations continually change the emotional color; what seemed stability is cracked and what seemed restless suddenly finds a support.

    Rachmaninoff does not describe a feeling.

    It reproduces the behavior.

    Because when we are deeply moved we do exactly this.

    Let's go.

    We stop.

    Let's go back to something.

    We think we got through it.

    And it's just a word for everything to start again.

    The Adagio grows.

    The initial quiet does not hold forever.

    The piano becomes more agitated, the writing thickens, the movement reaches a climax in which what had been whispered seems no longer to remain secret.

    But Rachmaninoff doesn't end there.

    And that's what makes the adult page.

    After touching the climax, return to intimacy.

    As it happens after a real cry.

    Not the film in which the world suddenly changes.

    The real one.

    When we stop because we no longer have tears, we dry our face and the room is still the same.

    Only we breathe a little differently.

    🎧 Listen to this.

    Follow the piano harping without losing them.

    While rumors change above, while melody passes from instruments to soloist, they continue.

    Almost a heartbeat.

    Almost time.

    Almost the daily life that insists on moving forward even on the days when something immense has happened within us.

    Perhaps for this reason the second movement moves so much.

    The world does not stop while we suffer.

    And sometimes, just the fact that you continue, slowly saves us.

    III. Allegro joking

    It's not enough to survive. At some point you have to go back to desire.

    The Final changes temperature immediately.

    After the intimacy of the Adagio, the movement returns. The piano recovers energy, the orchestra reacts, the rhythm becomes nervous, brilliant, sometimes impetuous.

    It is easy to simply feel the formal need for an energetic ending.

    But let's try to listen to him after what we know.

    The first movement had to learn how to move.

    The second had learned to breathe.

    The third seems to ask for something more difficult:

    You still want something from life?

    Because coming back to life doesn't just mean quitting.

    It means returning to want.

    And it's much more risky.

    Who does not want does not lose.

    Who does not love is not abandoned.

    Whoever doesn't try doesn't fail.

    After a great injury, renounce can even seem like a form of intelligence.

    Rachmaninoff, instead, returns to desire.

    And we hear it when the great second theme of the Final appears.

    It's one of the most famous melodies I wrote.

    It opens naturally, grows, expands its breath and seems to ask the whole orchestra to become one huge instrument capable of singing.

    Rachmaninoff doesn't smell anymore.

    And fortunately.

    The Late-Romantic Russian tradition to which it belongs had inherited from Tchaikovsky an extraordinary ability to transform melody into psychological experience. It is not a generic "Russian soul", suggestive but too easy formula; it is precise composition choices: very broad phrases, harmonies that delay distension, dark and deep orchestral colors, large crescendi built on a long-lasting tension.

    The emotion, in short, does not replace the technique.

    It is made possible by the technique.

    And that's why it doesn't become sentimental.

    That melody of the Final is continually hampered.

    He still can't become what he wants to be.

    Back the energetic material.

    Music devia.

    The piano fight.

    The orchestra relaunches.

    Rachmaninoff continues to promise us a landing and continues to postpone it.

    Because if he had delivered the big final blast right away, he would have moved us for 30 seconds.

    Instead it compels us to deserve it with listening.

    The melody must first know the interruption.

    The desire must meet a resistance.

    The light must remember what the dark was.

    And then it happens

    Towards the conclusion, the theme returns.

    But now something has changed.

    The shade opens towards I.

    The orchestra expands.

    The piano is no longer the man only of the first jokes that tries an agreement after the other.

    It is now inside the orchestra and at the same time above it; it participates, supports, conquers the space.

    And that melody that he had to ask for permission to exist can finally spread throughout his own breadth.

    I wouldn't call this "trionph on depression."

    It would be too brutal for real life.

    I'd call it another way.

    The return of chance.

    The chance to feel joy again.

    To trust a sentence again.

    To write a page again.

    To still love something enough to be afraid to lose it.

    The note remains

    Perhaps the Second Concerto still moves us so deeply because it does not promise us a life without pain.

    It promises us something more credible.

    That from pain can still be born movement.

    That after a long immobility we can find a gesture.

    That a voice we thought lost could come back, initially uncertain, and find that we still have a lot to say.

    They taught us to call this "romantic" concert.

    That's true.

    But "romantic" doesn't just mean love.

    It means believing that human interiority is important enough to deserve an entire orchestra.

    Fear.

    The desire.

    Memory.

    Loss.

    Hope.

    Even the shame of needing someone.

    Everything can enter the music.

    And Rachmaninoff takes everything.

    Maybe starting again doesn't mean returning to being the ones before.
    It means finding out that, despite everything, something still exists within us capable of singing.

    🔎 One thing to know

    The Concert was born on the contrary

    There is a detail of his story that seems almost invented for this music.

    Rachmaninoff did not first compose the first movement.

    In the summer of 1900 theAdagio supported and the Final. It was these two movements that were publicly performed first, in December of the same year, obtaining a warm welcome. Only later came the Moderate initial; in November 1901 the full concert was presented in Moscow with Rachmaninoff at the piano and Siloti conductor.

    It's curious to think about it.

    We listen to those initial agreements as if they were the door from which the whole work entered the world.

    Historically, they were one of the last things to be born.

    Almost Rachmaninoff, only after finding a destination, had managed to understand where the journey should begin.

    And maybe this happens in life too.

    Sometimes we really understand our beginning only when we've already gone far ahead.

    Take him with you

    Soon the last deal will end.

    The D major will turn off.

    The piano will return to be wood, ropes and silence.

    Yet he tries to remember how it all started.

    Not with a melody.

    With repeated agreements.

    Almost a question addressed to his own body.

    Can I still?

    Thirty-five minutes later, the answer does not come through a sentence.

    It comes through an entire orchestra.

    This is what music can do and words sometimes, no.

    You can ask a question to which we cannot answer and keep it with you long enough because it changes shape.

    We won't always find a solution.

    Not always our minor do will become greater.

    And it would be offensive to promise.

    But there are days in which the miracle is much smaller.

    Get up.

    Phone.

    Write a line.

    Open the piano.

    Try again.

    A deal.

    Then another.

    And maybe that's why, more than a century later, millions of people continue to recognize themselves in Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto.

    Not because you tell a man's victory over pain.

    But because he tells something we all know.

    That fragile and almost invisible moment in which, after believing that we have nothing to give, we feel moving something within us.

    We don't know if it's gonna last.

    We don't know where he'll take us.

    But there is.

    And that's enough for today.

    🎧 One last listening

    When the Concert is finished, it only returns to the first jokes.

    Listen to those agreements again.

    The first time you didn't know where they were coming.

    I do now.

    And it's impossible to listen to them the same way.

    Perhaps this is one of the greatest powers of music: the final can change even the meaning of the beginning.

    The notes are identical.

    It's you who, meanwhile, went through something.

    2 answers to "Rachmaninoff: when the heart returns from silence"

    1. Avatar
      Anonymous

      It is precisely that described the true essence of Rachmaninov’s music, not a feeling, but a description of a lived, of an experience, of a torment and of a return to the principle, in which the ally hides and slowly appears the sense of waiting. G. Leopardi in the Saturday of the village claimed that true happiness lies in the desire and expectation of a future joy, a moment in which everything seems possible. The greatness of this huge musician is his ability to express in a compositional structure the deep sense of a reality as only the great artists can do. That is why the comment is perfect and explanatory of a relevant musical technique.

      Reply
    2. Avatar
      Anonymous

      A long introspective journey of life. The piano is an effective member of the orchestra that is skillfully and admirably calibrated in the stamps and nuances. Wonderful concert.

      Wonderful Rachmaninoff.

      Beautiful reading of the work. Thank you.

      Reply

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  • Kalinnikov: a melody, four movements, a life

    Today's listening: Vasilij Kalinnikov – Symphony No. 1 in a minor sol

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    Before you start music

    There are composers who seem to have had all the time in the world.

    Long career. Ten years of research. The possibility of correcting, rethinking, starting again.

    And then there is Vasilij Kalinnikov.

    Born in 1866, died in 1901, a few days before thirty-five years. A life crossed by economic difficulties, illness and talent that still managed to find his voice.

    When he composes his First Symphony, between 1894 and 1895, he is in Jalta, Crimea, where he moved to hope that the climate can alleviate tuberculosis.

    We do not imagine, however, a music necessarily folded on suffering.

    That would be too simple.

    And a little unfair.

    Because when the orchestra attacks, something surprising happens.

    The melody opens.

    Breathe.

    He stretches.

    It seems to want to go through a much larger space than life has given its author.

    And here comes the first question of our Sunday:

    can a man know deeply the fragility and, at the same time, write a music that seems in love with life?

    Kalinnikov does not give us a philosophical answer.

    He gives us a symphony.

    And maybe that's much better.

    🎧 Open listening. Then he keeps reading

    This page is designed to be read with music next door.

    To accompany our guide, I propose the recording of the USSR State Symphony Orchestra conducted by Evgenij Svetlanov, available on YouTube with the synchronized score. It is particularly useful because it allows you to visually follow the orchestral writing, in addition to listening to it.


    (click on the black arrow to make the listening appear)

    Start the music.

    And for a few moments don't try to understand everything.

    Just let the first melody reach you.

    Because she's the one who's coming back.

    And when he does, he won't be exactly the same.

    Inside the score

    When four movements become one story

    The First Symphony is in a minor sol and is divided into the four movements of the nineteenth century symphonic tradition. But its most significant building principle is the cyclical form: the thematic material of previous movements returns to the Final, undergoing transformations that give the whole composition a sense of unity.

    A fundamental detail: we pass from the initial minor to the final major.

    It is not enough, alone, to tell the whole musical story, but it is an important element of the expressive journey.

    The shade preserves its fundamental.

    Changes the way the fundamental one is illuminated.

    And this is exactly what I want to invite you to listen.

    I. Allegro Moderate

    The birth of a melody

    From the beginning to 14:12

    The symphony begins without a long introduction.

    The main theme is presented by the arches in unison.

    It is a wide, cantabile melody, with an immediate recognizable profile, which recalls the breath of the Russian melodic tradition.

    We have no impression that the orchestra is simply announcing an idea.

    It looks like he found a voice.

    Observe the way the phrase stretches: it does not proceed through small isolated fragments, but builds an arc that asks for space to develop.

    Writing lets emerge that quality that we often associate with the great Russian symphony: a cantability capable of preserving an almost popular dimension without sacrificing culture.

    But Kalinnikov is not limited to repeating a pleasant melody.

    The first movement adopts the form-sound.

    After the presentation of the first theme group, there is a second idea, more relaxed and lyrical, also entrusted to the arches, with the coloristic contribution of the wood. It follows a development in which the material is reworked also through counterpointing procedures.

    Here it is important to distinguish two levels.

    The melody involves us emotionally.

    The form, however, organizes that involvement in time.

    The listener recognizes, loses, finds, waits.

    In other words, it begins to remember.

    And a symphony that can make us remember something while we are still listening to it has already established a relationship with us.

    🎧 Listen to this.

    During the first movement, try to distinguish three moments:

    • The initial theme display: store the profile.
    • The arrival of the second idea: known how the character changes, especially in greater melodic distension.
    • The return of the initial material: listen to what was recognizable after development.

    Don't just look for a beautiful melody.

    Look for a melody that can become a memory.

    Because the Final will need it.

    II. Commode Andante

    The delicacy of what continues to live

    From 14:12 to 21:41

    If the first movement is a great landscape, the second seems to narrow the frame suddenly.

    We are no longer in front of a horizon.

    We're close to something.

    Maybe a person.

    Maybe a memory.

    The Andante opens with an obstinate of the harp and the first violins, accompanied by descending agreements that change color through the distribution between the different orchestral sections.

    The English horn contributes to the initial atmosphere; then the oboe has a wide and tender melody, supported by the pizzicati of the arches.

    Let's stop here.

    Because this is an orchestration lesson.

    The obstinate is not only a form of accompaniment.

    Creates a sound environment in which the theme can appear.

    It is like a light that remains constant while objects, crossing it, acquire different colors.

    The composer uses the transparency of the staff to make us feel every instrumental input.

    The oboe must not force itself.

    Just start singing.

    And yet we are not in front of a simple contemplative page.

    The melody is expanded, resumed and transformed; the movement crosses contrasting harmonic regions before rediscovering its initial atmosphere.

    The tenderness here is not the absence of tension.

    It consists in the possibility to cross it without losing the ability to sing.

    And maybe that's why the movement moves us.

    Because he doesn't want to convince us that everything is simple.

    It makes us feel something delicate that continues to exist even when harmony moves away from its stability.

    🎧 Listen to this.

    Focus on the entrance of the oboe.

    Then pay attention to what happens when the melody is resumed and distributed differently between the instruments.

    Don't just listen to the notes.

    Listen to the way things change when the voice changes.

    Keep this theme in your memory.

    In the Final we will find it in an amazing outfit.

    And there we will understand how Kalinnikov is capable of transforming an idea through the orchestration.

    III. I'm kidding. Allegro not too much

    Life, fortunately, does not always proceed at the tip of feet

    From 21:41 to 29:23

    And here we are at the third movement.

    After so much intimacy, Kalinnikov decides that it is time to move.

    The orchestra changes attitude.

    The rhythm acquires energy.

    The writing recalls the character of popular dance, with accents and figurations that give the movement a very Russian imprint.

    The Scherzo is not, however, a purely decorative episode.

    Its structure is ternary: an energetic initial section, a contrasting central trio and the return of the Scherzo. The Trio also has its own internal joint, with a liric melody entrusted to the wood, especially to the oboe.

    Again, Kalinnikov works on the contrast.

    Movement and suspension.

    Energy and singing.

    Dance and melancholy.

    And it is interesting to note that you do not need to continually invent new material to get variety.

    Wealth is born above all from the treatment of ideas.

    The same orchestra that just before seemed to contemplate an interior landscape now possesses an almost bodily energy.

    And here we can give ourselves a little observation.

    Symphonic music is often presented as a spiritually high activity, to be tackled possibly with a very serious expression.

    Kalinnikov, fortunately, reminds us that spiritual elevation can also feel like dancing.

    🎧 Listen to this.

    It identifies the contrast between the external sections and the central trio.

    When the initial material returns, ask yourself:

    Do I perceive it exactly as before?

    Or did the lyrical bracket change the way I listen to that same energy?

    It's a simple question.

    But it takes us to the heart of the entire symphony.

    Returning does not necessarily mean repeating.

    IV. Final: Allegro Moderate

    When memory becomes future

    From 29:23 to the conclusion

    And here we are at the decisive point.

    The Final begins with the theme material of the opening of the symphony.

    The melody we had heard at first is back here.

    But now it is in a different context: Kalinnikov introduces new ideas and recalls material from the previous movements, integrating it into a construction that leads to the conclusion in greater depth.

    This procedure has a precise name.

    Cyclic form.

    A technique that crosses the romantic symphony and that allows to establish thematic relationships between different movements.

    But stopping at the technical definition would be reductive.

    Because what happens in the Final is not a simple demonstration of compositional skills.

    It is a change of perspective.

    Regarding the second movement.

    That melody entrusted to the oboe seemed to belong to a delicate, almost private world.

    Now listen to what happens when some previous materials are taken from orchestral groups, until they are proclaimed by the brass.

    The melodic idea is not erased.

    It's enlarged.

    What was intimate before acquires a collective dimension.

    It is a transformation especially timbre and dynamic, as well as formal.

    The composer changes the sound body through which a theme is perceived.

    As if a thought, born in solitude, suddenly found the possibility of being pronounced before the world.

    And here music offers us one of his most fascinating paradoxes.

    You don't always need to change your mind to change your meaning.

    Sometimes it's enough the same idea to experience different experiences.

    🎧 Listen to this: the great return

    In the Final he looks for three moments.

    First, recognize the theme of opening. You will notice that the composer wants to bring you back to the point where everything started.

    Second, listen to the return of the lyric material. Pay attention to the different orchestral distribution and the way in which the timbric expansion changes its character.

    Third: follow the last progression towards the conclusion. Do not listen to it only as an increase in volume: observe how the thematic material and the shade contribute to building the sense of arrival.

    This is where the final sol major assumes its expressive function.

    It's not just a bright deal.

    It is the point of arrival of a path.

    The note remains

    There are melodies that come back because we haven't finished understanding them yet.

    Perhaps this is what makes Kalinnikov's First Symphony so interesting.

    Its thematic material does not remain immovable.

    Cross movements, harmonies, logs, instruments.

    Whenever he returns, he forces us to listen to him again.

    Isn't that what happens to us?

    We return to the places where we were happy.

    We listen to a song that belonged to another season.

    We find a person after many years.

    We think we're meeting something we already know.

    And instead we find that we have changed in the meantime.

    The place is the same.

    The song is the same.

    Maybe even the words are the same.

    But we're not the same listeners anymore.

    Kalinnikov musically builds something similar.

    The initial melody is preserved, but the context in which reappearance transforms our perception.

    We must not necessarily interpret this path as a victory over suffering.

    That would be too convenient.

    The composer's life reminds us that reality does not always have a major Final.

    The symphony, however, can offer us something that reality does not guarantee.

    A form.

    A chance to recompose what seemed lost.

    A way to find a sense of continuity through memory.

    And maybe that's what music is for.

    Not only to tell what happens to us.

    But to show us how the things we have lived can continue to transform within us.

    🔎 One thing to know

    A first performance to remember

    Symphony No. 1 was presented in Kyiv in 1897, under the direction of Aleksandr Vinogradsky.

    Success was such that the public asked the bis of the second and third movement. The composition was also performed in other European cities.

    Let's picture the scene.

    A young composer, sick, away from the great musical centers.

    A symphony that finally reaches the audience.

    And the listeners who, after hearing two movements, ask to listen again.

    Today, the bis of a whole symphonic movement could seriously challenge the organization of a concert season.

    But at that moment it had to be something extraordinary.

    Not just a success.

    The confirmation that that music, born in such difficult conditions, had found someone willing to welcome it.

    There is also a later curiosity: in 1943 Arturo Toscanini directed the First Symphony with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, contributing to its diffusion through an American radio broadcast.

    Another proof of the ability of the score to cross different eras and contexts.

    Take him with you

    When the last deal is over, try to remember the first.

    That initial melody.

    His breath.

    Its apparent simplicity.

    Then think about the path you have completed.

    It passed through the development of the first movement.

    He left room for the delicacy of the Andante.

    He met the energy of Scherzo.

    Finally, she's back.

    Not to take us back.

    But to show us how far we have gone.

    Maybe this is the best lesson in the symphony.

    Not everything that comes back leads us back to the past.

    Some things come back just to allow us to move on.

    A music.

    A person.

    A memory.

    Part of us who thought we were lost.

    And that one day we recognize, almost without waiting for it, in a new form.

    Kalinnikov had no long life.

    But he left us a music capable of suggesting that life is not the only measure of existence.

    It also counts what we can make resound.

    What we deliver.

    What keeps reaching someone when we can't do it anymore.

    His first symphony ends up on a greater scale.

    The melody finds its fulfillment.

    And we, who followed her, can take away a little musical certainty.

    Sometimes life does not return what we have lost.

    But he can teach us to listen differently to what is left.

    🎧 One last listening

    Before closing the page, go back to the beginning of the symphony.

    Only listen to the first theme.

    You know him now.

    You know where he's coming.

    You know that melody will go through time and return transformed.

    And maybe it'll look different.

    It is the small miracle of cyclic form: the last page can change the way we listen to the first.

    An answer to "Kalinnikov: a melody, four movements, a life"

    1. Avatar
      Anonymous

      Appropriate analysis.

      Reply

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  • Bach's secret is in what he doesn't say

    Listening today: Johann Sebastian Bach – Erbarm dich mein, or Herre Gott, BWV 721

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    Before you start music

    There are words that we pronounce easily.

    Thank you. Goodbye. See you tomorrow.

    Others, on the other hand, seem to have to cross a whole life before reaching lips.

    Forgive me.

    We don't always have the courage to say that. We don't always know who to turn. And sometimes, when we finally find the words, the person we would have wanted to deliver them is no longer before us.

    This Sunday, one of our readers leads us right there: in the fragile place where a human being stops defending himself and finds the courage to ask for mercy.

    He does it through Johann Sebastian Bach and the organ choral Erbarm dich mein, or Herre Gott, BWV 721.

    The title means: «Have mercy on me, O Lord God».

    A request.

    Not a triumphant declaration of faith. Not a demonstration of strength. Not an attempt to convince someone of their innocence.

    Only a voice that asks to be heard.

    The song probably belongs to the young years of Bach, around 1704. It is an organ page with unusual writing: a slow melody, placed in the upper voice, supported by a plot of chords.

    Very few elements.

    Yet, listening to them, we will have the impression that something continues to breathe even when it does not find the words.

    Perhaps because mercy, even before being a theological concept, responds to a profoundly human need: to be looked at without being reduced to our error.

    🎧 Open listening. Then he keeps reading

    This page is designed to be read with music next door.

    (click on the black arrow to make the listening appear)

    Start listening.

    Don't look for the melody now.

    Listen to what happens around her.

    Because in this page pain is not only entrusted to the voice that sings.

    It is hidden even in what keeps cleaning under her.

    Inside the score

    An ancient melody and a heart that continues to beat

    To understand this coral you have to go back, even before Bach.

    In 1524 Erhart Hegenwalt published Erbarm dich mein, or Herre Gott, a paraphrase of Psalm 51, the Miserere. The melody, also documented in 1524, is often linked to Johann Walter, but its attribution is not certain.

    We are in the world of Lutheran coral: a tradition in which community singing becomes a fundamental part of religious experience.

    The text comes from repentance. But be careful: he does not simply tell the guilt.

    He asks that the last word does not belong to the fault.

    And that's where the music gets interesting.

    Bach takes the melody of the coral and places it in the upper part, entrusting them with long, mainly minimal values.

    Below, however, has agreements of four and five voices, repeated in chromes.

    Sounds like a basic solution.

    A slow voice. Regular accompaniment.

    Yet this difference produces expression.

    The melody proceeds with gravity, almost looking for the courage to complete each sentence.

    The agreements, however, continue.

    They come back.

    They insist.

    I'm not a second melody competing with the first. They are a harmonic pulsation, a movement that sustains and together restless.

    Of course, Bach did not write next to the agreements «heartbeat».

    This is a possible expressive reading, not an indication of the score.

    But their movement really possesses something of the breath: a physical continuity that seems to prevent the sentence from abandoning itself completely.

    And here we meet a beautiful thought.

    When someone suffers, we often imagine that what he needs is an answer.

    An explanation.

    A solution.

    Bach seems to suggest musically another possibility.

    Sometimes what sustains a voice is not another voice that answers it. It's something that keeps beside her.

    The trembling of mercy

    There is something deeply human in the way Bach builds this coral.

    The melody proceeds slowly, almost looking for the courage to pronounce every word.

    Under her, the debated agreements continue to clean.

    It's a movement that doesn't allow a truce. It does not necessarily represent a heart that beats: Bach did not leave such an indication. But it is difficult to listen to this page without feeling a form of restlessness, a tremor that crosses music from within.

    It's not the tremor of those who are about to fall. That's who finally found the courage to ask for help.

    In the interpretation of Ton Koopman, the choral voices through the historical organ built by Hans Heinrich Bader between 1639 and 1643, in the St. Walburgiskerk of Zutphen, in the Netherlands.

    Listen to how the arrangement movement accompanies the melody without immediately melting the tension.

    The upper voice seems to look for an answer.

    The accompaniment continues to support it.

    And in this so essential relationship one of the most moving insights of the page is manifested.

    The organ, an instrument capable of filling a cathedral, does not need to unfold all its power.

    She can be intimate.

    It can leave room for fragility.

    It can become the place where a supplication finally finds the possibility of being pronounced.

    And maybe this is Bach's secret.

    He does not make us listen to a man who has already received mercy. It makes us listen to a man who still finds the courage to ask.

    🎧 Listen to this.

    Try now to listen to the song by following three details.

    1. The distance between melody and accompaniment. The upper voice proceeds slowly; the underlying chords repeat with a much thicker regularity. Try to listen simultaneously to the two different ways of living time.

    2. Harmonic tensions. Not all successions produce the same feeling of rest. Some passages introduce a more pronounced restlessness, even through chromatic inflexions. Pay attention to how harmony changes the emotional meaning of melody.

    3. The conclusion. The song is in fa diesis minor, but ends on a fa diesis agreement greater. The final passage therefore introduces a color change: not a light explosion, rather a discrete extension.

    You do not need to know tonal harmony to feel it.

    Just listen to the last sentence and ask yourself:

    Is it really identical, emotionally, to what we heard at first?

    The answer should not be immediate.

    Let your ear find it.

    The note remains

    Perhaps mercy begins when someone allows us to be fragile without asking us to stop immediately.

    In everyday language we often use the word for forgiveness as if it designates an instant gesture.

    A pronounced phrase.

    A tense hand.

    A closed matter.

    But human experience is generally less ordered.

    There are mistakes we keep remembering even when others have forgotten them.

    There are wounds that do not disappear because someone has pronounced the right words.

    And there are absences before which the desire to be forgiven mixes with that, equally impossible, of being able to go back.

    The coral gives us a different image.

    The melody is not taken away from its gravity.

    Accompaniment does not stop cleaning to give her immediate relief.

    Harmony passes through its tensions before finding a point of arrival.

    It is a musical form that allows to think mercy not as a cancellation of the past, but as a possibility not to remain eternally prisoners.

    And maybe we should remember in human relationships.

    How often do we ask others to be strong, instead of asking ourselves if they do not simply need to be welcomed?

    How easily do we make a mistake in the identity of who has committed it?

    How difficult can we give ourselves the understanding that, sometimes, we can offer others?

    There are no questions a coral can answer.

    Music is not a court.

    Fortunately, it is not even an office where you have to fill out the correct form to get a little compassion.

    It is a space in which these questions can finally be heard.

    And in Bach, sometimes listening itself takes the form of tenderness.

    🔎 One thing to know

    A coral so simple that it seems impossible?

    The BWV 721 occupies a particular position in the organ repertoire attributed to Bach.

    His writing is so different from the great counterpoints of the composer who, in the early 20th century, Albert Schweitzer also expressed doubts about his authenticity.

    Today the song is generally attributed to Bach, while remaining a stylistically singular page. We do not own the autograph: its transmission depends on a handwritten copy of the first eighteenth century linked to Johann Gottfried Walther.

    The story is also interesting from the musicological point of view.

    For a long time we were accustomed to recognizing genius especially through complexity.

    But here complexity is not manifested in the proliferation of lines.

    It focuses on the relationship between a few elements.

    A melody.

    Repeated agreements.

    A harmonious path.

    And a question that never loses its character of supplication.

    Perhaps simplicity is not what remains when you have nothing to say. It is what remains when we have finally found the essential.

    Take him with you

    When the last agreement has vanished, do not immediately start the day.

    Let the room slowly return to its noises.

    Maybe you'll hear the traffic.

    Someone who speaks in another room.

    The phone that demands attention with the usual conviction of being the center of the universe.

    The world will continue.

    Like he always did.

    But for a few minutes we will have heard something that our time seems to have forgotten.

    The possibility of not having to be continuously impeccable.

    Not knowing all the answers.

    That we can't always explain what we feel.

    To be able to ask for help without turning that request into a defeat.

    A man from the 16th century wrote words of mercy.

    A young musician, many years later, gave her to an organ.

    A contemporary interpreter resounded them.

    And today one of our readers has given them to this column.

    Music has crossed the centuries without losing its question.

    Perhaps because, beyond the differences of language, faith and culture, we all know at least one moment in which we would have wanted someone to tell us:

    You can stop defending yourself. I'm listening.

    This Sunday Bach does not give us a certainty.

    It gives us a voice.

    And something that continues to support her.

    Because tenderness is not always a pronounced word.

    Sometimes it is simply the presence of who, while we seek the courage to speak, remains.

    And he's not leaving.

    🎧 One last listening

    Now let the coral go.

    This time do not try to distinguish voices, tensions or resolutions.

    Just listen to what happens inside you.

    Because a listening guide can accompany you to the threshold of music.

    But the last step always belongs to those who listen.

    An answer to "Bach's secret is in what he doesn't say"

    1. Avatar
      Anonymous

      impeccable comment both from the point of view of the music content and from the text. Deep and relevant analysis.

      Reply

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  • When a locomotive becomes a legend

    Listening today: Francesco Guccini – The locomotive

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    Before you start music

    Also this Sunday the door of the column opens thanks to one of you.

    Our reader offers us Francesco Guccini and The locomotive.

    And this time let's prepare: we will not simply enter a song.

    We'll get on a train.

    At first it will proceed almost with narrative step. Then it will acquire weight, tools, tension, speed. And when we think we're still in front of a songwriter with a guitar, we'll realize that Guccini has already dragged us into a nineteenth-century tale of workshops, steam, injustice, anger and myth.

    It lasts more than eight minutes.

    Today, in the time when after twenty seconds someone fears that the content "does not hold", it may seem a subversive act already this.

    Yet listen to her.

    After a while we will not wait for it to end.

    It will be the locomotive not to let us go.

    🎧 Open listening. Then he keeps reading

    This page is designed to be read with music next door.

    – THE COMMUNITY

    (click on the black arrow to make the listening appear).

    Start the song.

    For the moment, do not focus on political significance.

    Listen to something much easier first:

    as the song walks.

    Then see what happens at your step.

    Inside the score

    The locomotive appears in RadiusGuccini's fourth album, recorded in the spring of 1972. The arrangements were curated by Pier Farri, Guccini and Vince Tempera; around the voice and guitar we find bass, drums, keyboards, electric guitar, flute, banjo and even mellotron. It is a record in which folk cantautorale opens up to a wider sound palette, with some echoes of the progressive sensitivity of those years.

    Tu The locomotive has a fascinating paradox.

    Its harmony is relatively simple. His dramaturgy is not.

    Vince Tempera told that precisely that long succession of stanzas posed a problem of arrangement. The solution was to gradually increase tension through changes in shades and addition of instruments.

    It is a lesson of narrative composition.

    If the harmonic material does not change radically, it must change the energy with which we perceive it.

    And so music does exactly what a locomotive does.

    First it sets the mechanism in motion.

    Then it takes speed.

    Then it becomes difficult to imagine being able to stop her.

    🚂 THE MOTOR OF THE CANZONE

    Try to imagine four listening stations:

    RACCONTO → MOVIMENT → ACCUMULATION → COURSE

    At first Guccini is almost a narrator.

    The voice must show us a man we don't know.

    Then the rhythm acquires insistence.

    New colors come in.

    The stanzas happen and the arrangement gradually stops being simple background: begin to push the story from behind.

    We do not need the realistic noise of pistons and wheels.

    The train is already in the musical form.

    This is the thing to listen to.

    The locomotive is not imitated. It is built over time.

    But who was that man?

    And here we are at the most interesting point.

    Why The locomotive born of a real fact.

    The historical protagonist was Pietro Rigosi, twenty-year-old and railway fireman. According to the reconstruction of Treccani, on 20 July 1893 he took a locomotive released by a freight convoy and departed in the direction of Bologna, reaching a speed of about 50 km hours, remarkable for the time. The machine was deviated and ended up against stationary cargo tanks; Rigosi survived.

    But here comes the essential point:

    the song is not the news of the event.

    Guccini transforms Rigosi.

    He delivers a symbolic opponent.

    It builds around him the image of the clash between those who own little and those who possess much, between fatigue and privilege, between industrial machine and rebellion.

    The famous luxury train towards which in the song seems to direct the locomotive belongs to the poetic construction: in the historical story there was not that clash between two trains.

    And that doesn't "slow" the song.

    On the contrary.

    Show us as a myth arises.

    When history becomes danced

    Here Guccini has done something that the singers have done for centuries.

    He's got a thing.

    It changes.

    It enlarges it.

    It assigns a form that can be remembered.

    He doesn't write a railway record.

    He writes an epoeia.

    And the same language says it: Guccini consciously adopted an emphatic and rhetorical tone that recalled the tradition of the anarchist song between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The same singer-songwriter would have remembered that the song was born as an anarchist and romantic story, becoming only later a sort of collective flag.

    It's an ancient phenomenon.

    Achilles does not coincide with a war bulletin.

    Rolando doesn't coincide with Roncisvalle's record.

    And Pietro Rigosi, once entering the song, does not coincide completely with Pietro Rigosi.

    Become a the character a community can sing.

    🎧 Listen to this.

    Now go back to Guccini's voice.

    Note as stories before singing.

    The phrasing must contain a huge amount of words without breaking narrative tension.

    It is a fundamental feature of the great song: melody cannot become a cage for the text.

    You have to bring him.

    Sometimes anticipate it.

    Sometimes leave him room.

    And here is also a beautiful provocation for those who consider "music" only what has an immediately seductive melody.

    In The locomotive the word produces rhythm.

    The story produces form.

    Repeat generates wait.

    And the listener progressively begins to know the path to the point to want its return.

    That's how a song becomes ritual.

    Speed is not only speed

    For years Guccini has placed The locomotive at the end of their concerts. It had become practically inevitable: the public waited for it as you expect a conclusion that you already know and that, precisely for this, you want even more. The official site recalls it as a constant presence in the final of the concerts; in live performances it was made even more incalciating.

    And it's interesting.

    Because at that point The locomotive no longer belongs to the author.

    Everyone knows her.

    The public anticipates.

    She recognizes.

    Join.

    The concert stops for a few minutes being:

    a song → others listen

    and becomes:

    Everyone knows where we're going.

    It is perhaps one of the oldest forms of collective musical experience.

    More than custom streaming.

    Nobody asked the algorithm what you want to listen to later.

    The next track is already decided by a few thousand people.

    And good luck to those who try to change the ladder.

    The note remains

    Sometimes music does not tell the story as it happened.
    Tell her why we needed to remember her.

    This distinction is fundamental.

    The historical Pietro Rigosi deserves to be known in his reality.

    The Pietro Rigosi of Guccini belongs instead to poetry.

    Confuse the two would be bad story.

    Pretend they should be identical would be bad art.

    The song transforms an individual fact into a universal question:

    how much can a man accumulate before he decides to break the order of things?

    We must not approve the gesture to understand the question.

    And this is where listening becomes interesting today.

    Because locomotives change, factories change, jobs change.

    But the relationship between dignity, frustration, inequality and desire to be seen does not belong exclusively to the nineteenth century.

    The great political songs survive when they manage to overcome contingent politics and reach something more difficult:

    the human condition that generates conflict.

    🔎 One thing to know

    Guccini said he had written The locomotive with an exceptional speed.

    He had met the story of Rigosi in the memories of the Bolognese working world and said he had employed about half an hour to write the song, taking notes for later stanzas while composing the previous one.

    The amazing part?

    The beginning was last written.

    It's almost perfect.

    A song on a locomotive race was written practically on the run.

    Evidently, for once, even the white page had the common sense of getting rid of the tracks.

    Little curiosity by musicians

    Vince Tempera also remembers the presence of Moog in the arrangement of Radius, confessing with a certain autoironia that then did not even know how to use it.

    Seventies, gentlemen.

    You bought a synthesizer and then you saw what happened.

    Today we do the same with some software updates, so we avoid generational superiority.

    Take him with you

    When the eight minutes have passed, stop before listening.

    Not because The locomotive He's necessarily right.

    The best works of art do not serve to give us reason.

    We need to be more difficult to remain indifferent.

    We met a really existed man and a character who never existed exactly like that.

    A true locomotive and a symbolic locomotive.

    A chronicle and a legend.

    A failed gesture and a song that, instead, continues to run for more than half a century.

    Maybe this is the best paradox.

    Pietro Rigosi's locomotive was stopped.

    Guccini's not.

    He crossed different records, squares, concerts, generations and political ideas.

    It came from who in 1972 was twenty years old to whom today meets for the first time on a screen.

    And he keeps asking a question.

    Not necessarily:

    Where are you?

    Maybe a bigger one:

    What makes a human being willing to risk everything to oppose what he considers unjust?

    The answer is not simple.

    Luckily.

    Otherwise we wouldn't need history or music.

    That's enough.

    Guccini, on the other hand, leaves us a train running.

    And after more than fifty years, we are still here to listen to him passing through.

    An answer to "When a locomotive becomes legend"

    1. Avatar
      Anonymous

      BRAVA, transversal and 360° skills. Great reading of this famous Guccini song. Congratulations! !

      Reply

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  • When a song becomes home

    Listening today: Noa – No potho reposing

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    Before you start music

    This Sunday the music comes once again from one of you.

    A reader has proposed No potho reposing and chose, in particular, the live interpretation of No..

    And maybe he couldn't choose a version more suited to the spirit of this column.

    Because there are songs that belong to an author.

    Then there are others who, at some point in their history, seem to stop belonging only to those who wrote them. They pass by mouth, from generation to generation, enter into marriages, departures, returns, memorials. Someone sings them and someone else, without knowing well why, feels like he's home.

    No potho reposing It's one of these.

    It is not officially the hymn of Sardinia — since 2018 it is Procurade and moderate — but it was even among the songs taken into consideration for that recognition. More than an institutional anthem, it has become something perhaps even more difficult to decree by law: a place of collective memory.

    🎧 Open listening. Then he keeps reading

    This page is designed to be read with music next door.

    (click on the black arrow to make the listening appear).

    The recording that accompanies our listening dates back to Christmas concert of 9 December 2006. Noa dedicated her to Andrea Parodi and Sardinia. The video is now published on the official channel of the artist.

    Let her go.

    And for a few minutes don't worry about understanding every word.

    First he listens to what the voice does when words belong to something bigger than her.

    Inside the score

    The title with which today we know the song comes from poetry To Diosa, written in 1915 by Salvatore "Badore" Sini, lawyer and poet of Sarule. In 1920, Joseph Rachel made his famous musical appearance; from the following year the composition appeared in the repertoire of the Philharmonic Musical Body of Nuoro directed by Rachel himself.

    And it's important to point out something.

    No potho reposing was not born as an ancient anonymous song mysteriously emerged between the Sardinian mountains.

    He has authors. He's got a date. He's got a story.

    Yet time has turned on it a fascinating transformation: a song has been gradually absorbed by tradition until it is perceived as a common heritage. Cori, popular singers, classical musicians, jazz musicians and rock artists crossed it into dozens of different interpretations.

    This, for a musicologist, is already a wonderful story.

    Folklore is not always what is born without author.

    Sometimes it's also what a community decides not to let go.

    A melody that can't stand still

    The meaning of the title is simple and terrible:

    "I can't rest. "

    He who speaks does not find peace because thought continually returns to the loved one.

    Today probably someone would recommend distraction, exit, do sports, silence notifications and possibly not control the last access.

    Salvatore Sini did something less practical.

    He wrote a poem.

    Lucky for us.

    Rachel's music has a wide, cantabile performance, supported by a ternary pulsation that gives it something of the cradle and something of the incessant movement.

    And here's the little paradox.

    The music waves gently.

    The text, however, says there is no peace.

    The musical body seems to cradle what the heart cannot placate.

    It does not need a great harmonic complexity to achieve this effect. Strength lies in the continuity of the line, in the melodic opening and in the return of phrases: love is not represented as a momentary explosion, but as a thought that insists.

    Come back.

    And he's still coming back.

    As some names do within us.

    🎧 Listen to this.

    Now try to stop following the translation.

    Listen the direction of phrases.

    You will feel the melody continuously upwards and then falls, as if it tries to reach something that remains a little further.

    Listen to the repetitions.

    In a bad song, repetition may be a lack of ideas.

    This is the opposite.

    Repeating means not being able to stop thinking.

    And then listen to Noa.

    Do not try to determine whether its pronunciation belongs to Sardinia. That's not the point.

    This is a voice coming from elsewhere and entering a music received as a gift.

    And it is precisely this distance to make interpretation so meaningful.

    A handy song

    Here history becomes almost more beautiful than musicology.

    Noa says that Andrea Parodi invited her to Sardinia and taught her No potho reposing. In the description published on his official channel, he recalls his voice, his artistic audacity and the deep bond he had with the island. Shortly after that meeting Parodi died, at 51. When Noa participated in the 2006 Christmas concert, she chose this song and dedicated it to her memory and Sardinia.

    Let's think.

    A poet writes for a woman.

    A composer turns those words into song.

    An island adopts that song.

    Andrea Parodi takes him in his own voice to make one of the symbolic interpretations of his path.

    Then he teaches it to an Israeli singer.

    He is gone.

    She sings it.

    This is what music can do with time.

    Don't cancel it.

    He crosses it.

    Andrea Parodi had made No potho reposing a constant presence of its repertoire; the Foundation that bears its name also documents the collaboration with Noa in 2006.

    And then the performance we are listening to is not just a cover.

    IS a return.

    The note remains

    There are music that remind us when we no longer know how to do it.

    This is perhaps one of the reasons why No potho reposing has crossed the border of the simple love song.

    He speaks of a precise person, and yet everyone can live it.

    It's about distance, but it's become a member.

    He speaks of someone who cannot rest thinking of those who love, and over a century he was sung for loves present, distant, lost, for a land left and found, for people who continue to live in memory.

    Something happens here that belongs to music rather than words.

    A poem says:

    I love you.

    A song sung by thousands of people ends up saying:

    we know what it means.

    And it is in that passage from me to us that a song begins to become heritage.

    🔎 One thing to know

    No potho reposing is also known with the original title To Diosa.

    Salvatore Sini's poem dates back to 1915; Joseph Rachel put it in music in 1920. In the course of the 20th century the song passed through choirs, interpreters of tradition, cultured music, jazz and popular music, until it became one of the most recognizable sound symbols of Sardinia.

    And a curiosity says a lot about its identity value: in 2018 No potho reposing was among the alternatives discussed to become official anthem of the Sardinia Region. In the end it was chosen Procurade and moderate.

    Maybe that's okay.

    Some songs do not need a decree.

    They have already been elected from the heart.

    Take him with you

    When the last note is over, think for a moment about the journey that made this music.

    From Sarule to Nuoro.

    From paper to voice.

    From Sardinia to the world.

    From Andrea Parodi to Noa.

    And now from our reader to this page.

    That's exactly why we wanted to open it. Sunday listening to your proposals.

    A beloved music does not remain firm.

    It's delivery.

    Somebody let us know.

    We keep it for a while.

    Then we'll go to someone else.

    And perhaps this is the most beautiful form of immortality that music can grant: do not prevent things from ending, but allow them to continue in another voice.

    No potho reposing speaks of a love that does not let rest.

    But after more than a century he also tells something else.

    A land.

    A language.

    A man who gave a song to another voice.

    A singer who, when that man was gone, returned her singing.

    And a reader who today decided to pass it to us.

    The music, basically, does this.

    Don't keep it.

    Pass.

    And by the way, he can stay.

    Leave a comment

  • Lightness is a serious thing

    Listening today: Jacques Ibert – Trois pièces brèves for breath quintet

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    Before you start music

    This Sunday begins with a good news.

    The song we are about to hear we have proposed a reader.

    And that's exactly what we hoped would happen when she was born. Sunday listening: that, at some point, someone knocked at the door of the column with music in his hands and simply said:

    «You have to listen to this.»

    The proposal brings us to Jacques Ibert and his Trois pièces brèves for breath quintet.

    Flute.
    Oboe.
    Clarinet.
    Horn.
    Huge.

    Five instruments that, put together, seem almost a small civil society.

    No one has exactly the same voice as the other. Everyone has a pretty recognizable personality. Someone loves to talk. Someone else prefers to comment. The horn diplomatically attempts to hold the group together. When he wants, he seems to know the end of history and have fun not to tell us.

    I mean, more than a quintet, a particularly successful condo meeting.

    Yet Ibert manages to transform these differences into just over seven minutes of elegance, intelligence, theatre and humour.

    No monuments.

    No proclaims.

    No one seems to want to explain the ultimate meaning of existence before dinner.

    And maybe that's why it's worth listening.

    🎧 Open listening. Then he keeps reading

    This page is designed to be read with music next door.

    (click on the black arrow to make the listening appear).

    Let the music go.

    And for once do not seek "the main theme."

    Listen who takes the word, who passes it to another, who interrupts, who accompanies and who suddenly changes the color of the conversation.

    Because Ibert doesn't wear music.

    It is already part of thought.

    Inside the score

    The Trois pièces brèves born in 1930 from a stage music and preserve something of that theatrical origin.

    He's heard.

    Not because they tell a precise plot, but because the five instruments seem continually Enter and exit from an imaginary scene.

    The breath quintet is, from this point of view, a wonderfully imperfect training.

    In a violin, viola and cello string quartet belong to the same family: register and character change, of course, but share a timbre matrix.

    In the breath quintet, instead, put together flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and phagoct means bringing together five individuals who could hardly be mistaken for each other.

    The flute can be light.

    The oboe possesses that subtle and penetrating voice capable of appearing melancholy even when it is simply saying good morning.

    The clarinet is the great transformist: warm, agile, dark, brilliant.

    The horn carries something of space, distance, orchestra.

    The bassoon can be noble and, three jokes later, take the air of those who just told a joke that only he understood.

    Ibert does not attempt to erase these differences.

    He uses them.

    And here is the first small teaching of the page:

    harmony does not necessarily arise from the likeness.

    Sometimes it comes from being able to be together and being perfectly recognizable.

    It wouldn't be a bad idea even out of music.

    I. Allegro – The conversation begins

    The first piece almost leaves without presentations.

    Music snaps.

    It's fast, mobile, brilliant.

    Materials go from one tool to another with a naturalness that we risk forgetting how sophisticated the writing necessary to make everything seem so simple.

    And it is one of the great tricks of true elegance.

    When the technique is really high, it often stops showing up.

    The theme is not simply repeated: changes personality depending on the instrument you receive.

    A phrase on the flute has a different weight if it passes to the oboe.

    On the clarinet it acquires another flexibility.

    In the bassoon it may suddenly seem that someone introduced a small dose of irony in the conversation.

    It's almost a speechless theater.

    Five characters.

    No absolute protagonist.

    And a writing in which precision never becomes rigidity.

    🎧 Listen to this.

    In the first movement try not only to follow the notes.

    Follow colors.

    Ask yourself:

    Who's talking now?

    And right after that:

    Would the same phrase have the same meaning if it was entrusted to another instrument?

    It is a small exercise, but it completely changes listening.

    Why do we begin to understand that the orchestration — even in such a small organic — does not come after the musical idea.

    It is the musical idea.

    II. Andante – When music stops wanting to have fun

    Then the second piece comes.

    And something changes.

    After the movement, arguzia, rapid exchanges, music retreats.

    Flute and clarinet emerge in a much more intimate dialogue.

    It doesn't happen very much.

    That's the point.

    We live in a time when, if nothing happened within seven seconds, someone already fears that the content is not performing well.

    Ibert doesn't seem particularly concerned.

    Leave room.

    Breathe.

    It dialogues two instruments without requiring them to continually produce an event.

    And suddenly we discover another form of lightness.

    Not the brilliant one in the first piece.

    The one from the measure.

    Know what to say.

    And, above all, know when to stop.

    III. Assez lent – Allegro joking

    The third piece begins with a suspension.

    It's like music looks around before deciding what to do.

    Then the scene changes again.

    Here comes theAllegro joking.

    And it is already contained in that word: joking.

    Not superficially.

    Not distracted.

    I'm kidding.

    One of the most intelligent indications that the history of music has left us: to accurately perform something that must seem born lightly.

    The instruments follow.

    They answer.

    They're provoked.

    The movement increases.

    And what had begun almost at the tip of feet gradually regains energy.

    Ibert does not build a great rhetorical final.

    He does not go up on the podium of the universe to give us his spiritual will.

    He greets us with intelligence.

    That, sometimes, is even more difficult.

    The note remains

    Lightness is not absence of weight.
    It is the ability to carry it without making it weigh to others.

    We often have a curious aesthetic bias.

    We think the depth should be recognizable by the gravity with which it enters the room.

    The more a music is slow, painful, dark, tormented, the more we are willing to consider it "important".

    If he smiles, he must immediately prove that he is not frivolous.

    It's a kind of cultural customs.

    Mahler can come in.

    Ibert, please open the suitcase.

    Yet authentic lightness is a very serious conquest.

    To be clear you have to choose.

    To seem spontaneous, you must know perfectly the job.

    To leave space to five tools so different it is necessary to avoid someone continually occupying the center.

    In Trois pièces brèves Ibert reminds us of something that goes well beyond music:

    not all that is deep must be heavy.

    There are thoughts that come without knocking with your fist.

    People capable of intelligence without exhibiting it.

    Emotions that do not need to shout to be true.

    And music that can tell us something important while they just seem to have fun.

    🔎 One thing to know

    The Trois pièces brèves, composed of 1930, are intended for the classical formation of the breath quintet:

    flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon.

    The three movements — Allegro, Andante and Assez lent – Allegro joking — In a few minutes, many of the typical qualities of Ibert's writing are concentrated: clarity, rhythmic mobility, timbre taste, theatrical sense and rejection of every academic heaviness.

    A short music, then.

    Which is very different from a small music.

    Take him with you

    When these few minutes are over, try to ask you what's left.

    Maybe not a specific theme.

    Maybe a color.

    A ride.

    A phagot response.

    A flute line.

    A moment in which five instruments seemed to speak at the same time without stopping listening.

    And maybe this is the most beautiful image to take away.

    Being together doesn't mean becoming equal.

    A good conversation is not the one in which everyone pronounces the same phrase.

    A good orchestra is not the one in which everyone possesses the same stamp.

    Music is born because there are differences capable of finding a relationship.

    Ibert does it without predictions.

    He doesn't write us on a sociological treaty.

    Seven minutes, five instruments and away.

    Which, we must admit, is a communication efficiency that many conferences could study with profit.

    And then there is one last thing.

    This listening came from our reader.

    Someone chose this music and decided to give it to the column so that other people could meet it.

    That's how Sunday listening It really starts to become a small community.

    One proposes.

    Someone else listens.

    Another, perhaps, discovers something he didn't know.

    Music passes by.

    And keep going.

    This Sunday leaves us a small lesson:

    not all that is worth must weigh.
    Not all that is light passes.

    Some things, just because they know how to walk without making noise, they can accompany us further.

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  • The heart that cannot stand still

    Today’s listening: Franz Schubert – Gretchen am SpinnradeD 118

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    30 August 2026

    Before you start music

    There are educated thoughts.

    They come, they get recognized and then, with some common sense, they leave.

    And then there are others.

    The ones coming back.

    Let's get them out and get back. We change room and follow. Let’s try to take care of each other and they, with a tenacity that deserves best cause, begin exactly from where we left them.

    Schubert was just seventeen years old when he turned one of these thoughts into music.

    A girl sits at the archer.

    Hands work.

    The wheel turns.

    But she's not there anymore.

    It is entirely within the memory of a man.

    🎧 Open listening. Then keep reading.

    This page is designed to be read with music next door.

    SCHUBERT – GRETCHEN AM SPINNRADE, D 118 (click on the black arrow to make the listening appear)

    Inside the score

    Before Margherita gave us a word, the piano already told us everything.

    The right hand constantly draws circular figures of semichrome.

    It is wheel of the archer.

    On the other hand, the left scans a regular, almost mechanical movement: the pedal, the foot gesture that keeps the wheel moving.

    Schubert does something extraordinarily modern: he does not simply describe an object.

    It transforms an external gesture into psychology.

    The wheel turns because the archer turns.

    But after a few jokes we understand that Gretchen's thinking is also turning.

    Meine Ruh ist hin.

    My peace is lost.

    All the Lied was born of this impossibility to stop.

    The piano continues to grind time while the voice recalls the passage of Faust, his face, smile, the sound of his words.

    The more she thinks about him, the more the music turns on.

    We are not looking at a girl at the archaeologist.

    We're listening an obsession from within.

    🎧 Listen to this.

    Follow the piano.

    At first the wheel seems almost regular, domestic.

    Then listen to what happens when Gretchen begins to remember Faust more intensely.

    The vocal line goes up.

    Harmony tends.

    The breath becomes more and more urgent.

    As long as the memory arrives:

    His kiss.

    And that's where Schubert makes the most beautiful gesture.

    For a moment, the wheel stops.

    The piano loses its incessant movement.

    As if the memory had become so powerful to interrupt even reality.

    Quiet.

    Suspension.

    Then Gretchen returns to himself.

    And slowly the wheel starts again.

    It's one of the moments when we understand why Schubert didn't just "play" Goethe.

    He read it through the sound.

    The note remains

    There are thoughts that we do not remember: we continue to live them.

    The greatness of Gretchen am Spinnrade is not only the famous imitation of the archaeologist.

    If so, we would have a wonderful descriptive music page.

    Schubert does something much deeper.

    At first we believe that the piano represents the wheel.

    In the end we understand that it represents Gretchen.

    His thought became circular.

    It does not proceed towards a conclusion. He always comes back to the same point: he.

    This is what happens to us when a memory becomes too big.

    The world keeps moving.

    We continue to do the necessary things.

    We open doors, we answer, we work, we fix, we walk.

    The wheel turns.

    Yet, under every gesture, there may be a name around which everything secretly continues to rotate.

    Schubert knew.

    She was seventeen.

    Which is slightly irritating for all of us who at seventeen years were already satisfied when we could understand what to do in the afternoon.

    Take him with you

    When the track ends, the wheel has not solved anything.

    Gretchen is no longer free than he was at first.

    The memory remains.

    The desire remains.

    Even the shade seems to bring it back to the point from which it had left.

    Yet we have understood something.

    Not all thoughts must lead us somewhere.

    Some come back because they keep something that we have not yet finished loving, understanding, losing or wanting.

    Maybe that's why Schubert lets the wheel continue.

    He's not trying to heal Gretchen.

    He listens.

    And in doing so he transforms his restlessness into one of the most extraordinary musical images of the human mind.

    A wheel.

    A girl.

    A memory.

    And that strange truth for which, sometimes, while life continues perfectly to proceed, the heart remains firm at the same point.

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