The Apeiron Armonies

Chronicles of the Apeiron

  • The unhappy fate of Music in the Italian school

    The unhappy fate of Music in the Italian school

    When a country forgets to educate listening, it also stops listening to itself.

    By Marialuisa Veneziano

    29 June 2026

    Is there a question that silently crosses the Italian classrooms, often covered by the noise of the bells, the bureaucratic urgencies, the programs to finish, the checks to be administered, the grids to be compiled: what place really occupies the music in our school?

    Not the place that is recognized in ministerial documents, in solemn declarations, in late-year projects, in colorful inns of essays. Not the rhetorical, decorative, celebratory place. But the real place. What is measured in daily consideration, over time allocated, in the resources available, in the formation of teachers, in the perception of families, in the cultural dignity that a school community recognizes in a discipline.

    The answer, if said without infinity, is painful: music in the Italian school often lives an unhappy destiny. It is present, but not always recognized; nominated, but not always understood; required when it serves to "make a feast", but forgotten when speaking of knowledge; celebrated as a universal language, but treated too often as an accessory, light, side matter. A kind of graceful sound upholstery of formation, useful to move to the rituals, to rejoice ceremonies, to cover the institutional gaps, but rarely placed at the center of a deep educational vision.

    Yet, this marginality is one of the greatest cultural misunderstandings of our school system. Because music is not a pastime. It's not entertainment. It is not the aesthetic fiocchetto to affor on an educational building already built elsewhere. Music is thought organized over time. It's mathematics. It is philosophy embodied in sound. It is historical memory, discipline of listening, body education, exercise of relationship, grammar of emotion, construction of form. It is one of the oldest and most refined ways in which the human being has learned to give order to chaos.

    Already in the Greek world, mousiké did not only indicate what we call music in a narrow sense, but a broader horizon: word, rhythm, poetry, education of the soul. Plato, though with all his cautele towards the perturbanized power of sounds, knew well that music forms the character before even the intellect can defend itself. Aristotle recognized music as an educational, ethical, cathartic function. In the Middle Ages, it belonged to the quadrivius along with arithmetics, geometry and astronomy: it was not an ornament, but a science of order. Boezio distinguished the mundane music, human music and instrumental music, reminding us that sound is not just what it odes, but what structure the cosmos, man and practice.

    It is curious, and tragic, that a school civilization descended from this tradition ended up reducing music, in common perception, to "practical matter", often opposed to "series" disciplines. Like doing didn't think. Like the body didn't know. As if playing, singing, listening, reading a score, understanding a form, distinguishing a timbre, recognizing a harmonic function, placing a song in its historical context were minor activities than the analysis of a literary text or the resolution of a mathematical problem.

    The truth is that music contains all this: text, number, history, logic, gesture, memory, interpretation. A boy who learns to play with others learns a very high form of citizenship. He must listen, wait, enter the right moment, respect the common time, control his own impulse, agree, correct, support the part of others. In a school orchestra, even small, even imperfect, there is already a model of society: no one can shout over others without destroying the form; no one can silent completely without impoverishing the whole; no one is really alone, because every voice exists in the relationship.

    That is why the fate of music at school is not just about musicians. It concerns the democracy of listening. It concerns the human quality of formation. It concerns the ability to educate generations not only to produce, compete, respond, perform deliveries, but also to hear, interpret, distinguish, inhabit silence, give meaning to time.

    The Italian school, on the other hand, often seems to be a prisoner of a contradiction. On the one hand, in general principles, it recognizes the value of humanistic culture, creativity, artistic and musical heritage. On the other hand, in ordinary practice, it does not always build conditions because that declaration becomes daily life. Music is expected, yes. There are musical paths in the first degree secondary school, musical high school, design, art plans, possible collaborations with conservatives, institutions and associations. But the system still appears fragmentary, discontinuous, entrusted too often to the good will of the individual teachers, to the sensitivity of a manager, to the geographical fortune of being born in a culturally equipped territory.

    The result is an unequal geography of musical education. There are schools where music becomes living experience, orchestra, choir, laboratory, sound thinking theatre. And there are schools in which it remains confined to a few residual activities, perhaps carried out in unsuitable classrooms, with insufficient tools, seamlessly design. There are students who meet teachers who can open worlds, and students who go through years of school without really understanding what a musical form is, because Bach is not only "old music", because jazz is a revolution of time and freedom, so that rock has told the twentieth century more than many manuals, so that Gregorian chant is not a museum powder, but a cathedral of breath.

    The first knot is cultural: music is often perceived as an emotional experience, but not as knowledge. This is the original sin. Of course, the music excites. But he's excited about organizing. He switches because he builds. Turba because he has a deep grammar. No one would say that the Divine Comedy is important only because it "makes emotions"; no one would reduce Caravaggio to the fact that he "culpts the eye"; no one would evaluate Euclide on the basis of "likes" or "I don't like". For music, it happens all the time. It remains to the surface of the taste: beautiful, ugly, cheerful, sad, relaxing. As if the school's task was to confirm the immediate impressions and not to educate them.

    Education in music means teaching to move from undivided emotion to awareness. From "I like" to "because he talks to me." From rapid consumption to critical listening. From the background to the shape. We live in a time when music is everywhere and, precisely for this reason, it risks not being listened anywhere. Accompanies shopping, phone wait, videos, advertising, social media, gyms, travel. It has become environment, noise, permanent soundtrack of existence. The boys listen to a lot of music, but they are rarely guided to understand it. They have access to an ocean, but often without a compass. And a school that does not provide guidance tools let the algorithms educate taste.

    This is a decisive point. Today musical education cannot be limited to the necessary theoretical literacy, nor can it take refuge in a museum nostalgia. It must be measured with Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, with digital production, with rap, with trap, with soundtracks, with sound design, with music in video games, with artificial creative intelligence. But measuring does not mean giving. It means interpreting. The school must teach that every sound language has a history, a technique, a social function, a rhetoric, an aesthetic. It must make it clear that Beethoven and Kendrick Lamar, Monteverdi and Morricone, Hildegard von Bingen and Björk, Bach and the Beatles are not in the same shelf for banalization, but they can enter into dialogue if there is a mind capable of listening to structure, context, invention, breakage, memory.

    The second node is pedagogical. Too often school music oscillates between two equally dangerous extremes: sterile notionism and depthless entertainment. On the one hand, dates, names, definitions, instruments studied as figurines; on the other, pleasant but unstructured activities, in which "making music" simply means occupying time with something pleasant. In the middle should be the true musical teaching: guided listening, vocal and instrumental practice, movement, invention, reading, analysis, history, technology, improvisation, critical reflection.

    Music you learn by doing, but doing must be thought. You learn by listening, but listening must be educated. You also learn by studying, but the study must return to sound, gesture, experience. An effective lesson in music is neither a conservative conference nor an hour of animation. It's a sensitive intelligence lab. It is the place where an African rhythm can open a reflection on the community, a Bach escape can show the beauty of logic, a protest song can become historical education, a rap song can introduce metric, rhetoric, identity, social marginality, rhythmic word. This is where the teacher's competence becomes decisive: it is not enough to "know a little music". You need to know music, pedagogy, history, contemporary languages, evolutionary psychology, group management, interdisciplinary design.

    The third knot is professional. Music, to be taught well, requires specific skills. This should be obvious, but it's not enough. No one would entrust the teaching of mathematics to those who "love numbers" or to those who "read novels". For music, however, it sometimes survives the idea that a generic artistic sensibility can suffice. That's not enough. Sensitivity is precious, but without competence becomes educational impressionism. The primary school, in particular, would need a more stable and structured musical presence. It is right there, in the early years, that the child builds the relationship with voice, rhythm, body, listening, coordination, sound memory. Late intervention often means correcting what has not been cultivated before.

    A serious country should consider basic musical education not as a luxury, but as a formative right. Just like linguistic and mathematical literacy. Because there is also a sound illiteracy: the inability to listen, distinguish, appoint, recognize, respect the acoustic landscape. It is a less visible illiteracy, but not less serious. It produces citizens exposed to noise, incapable of concentration, poor hearing memory, weak in perception of time, less trained in fine cooperation. A noisy society is not necessarily a musical society. In fact, it is often the opposite: the more noise there is, the less listening remains.

    The fourth knot is social. Music at school could be an extraordinary instrument of equality. Many children and boys will never enter a conservatory, they will not take private lessons, they will not possess a tool, they will not have families able to bring them to concert, they will not spontaneously meet the musical heritage. For them the school is the only door. If that door remains closed, musical culture becomes privilege. And when culture becomes privilege, the school failed a part of its constitutional mission.

    Music, on the other hand, can reveal invisible talents. He can give voice to those who struggle with the word. It can help fragile students find a place in the group. It can offer those who live economic marginality or affect an ordered, shared, non-competitive beauty experience. It can transform a difficult class into a possible ensemble, at least for a few minutes: and those minutes, sometimes, are worth more than many disciplinary predictions. Musical practice does not eliminate problems, does not perform miracles as a pedagogical saint, but creates different conditions: it forces the group to breathe together. And breathing together for a class is already a small revolution.

    But for all this to happen, we need choices. Not enough slogans. It is not enough to invoke "creativity" as a magic word, good for every financial project. Creativity is not pretty chaos. It is freedom in a form. It is ability to generate something new knowing constraints, materials, techniques. In music, nobody really improvises if they don't have a vocabulary. Jazz, which seems to be pure freedom, is also a fierce discipline of listening, harmony, time and response. The school should teach this: not opposition between rule and invention, but their alliance.

    The proposals, then, must be concrete.

    The first: progressively introduce teachers music specialists in the primary school, at least through structural and continuing modules, not episodic. The voice, rhythm, listening and basic instrumental practice must soon enter the formation of the child. Not as an extracurricular activity for those who can, but as an ordinary part of school experience.

    The second: build a real vertical curricle, from childhood to second degree. Today the music is likely to proceed for fragments: a bit of song, a little flute, a bit of history, a project, a essay. On the other hand, it serves a clear trajectory: sound exploration, voice, rhythm, movement, listening; then reading, overall practice, tools, language history; then analysis, technology, composition, critical interpretation. Each segment should know what it receives and what it delivers to the next.

    The third: strengthen the paths to musical address in the secondary school of the first degree, ensuring territorial balance, adequate spaces, tools, continuity of the chair and centrality of the music of the whole. The musical address should not be a happy island for a few, but a workshop of good practices capable of contaminating the entire school.

    The fourth: creating stable networks between schools, conservatories, musical high schools, theatres, concert associations, bands, choirs, operatic bodies, festivals, musical libraries. The school cannot carry on its own all the weight of artistic training; but it must be the intelligent center of an educating community. Not occasional visits, not one-time events, but lasting cultural pacts.

    The fifth: renew the contents without denying the heritage. Tradition does not defend itself by embalming it. He's defending himself by speaking to the present. Bach does not need to be "simplified" until he becomes harmless; he needs to be told as living architecture. Verdi is not a national statue; it is political theater, popular breath, scenic word. Gregorian is not an ecclesiastical reperto; it is experience of suspended time, of sacred as a sound form. Similarly, rap should not be liquidated as a lower youth product: it should be analyzed, understood, discussed, even criticized, but with serious instruments. The school should not pursue students' tastes; it must take them seriously to expand them.

    Sixth: educating listening as a transversal competence. Listening to music means learning attention, memory, forecast, comparison, suspension of judgment. In a time of notifications and fragments, long listening is almost a political act. Bringing a class to really listen to a piece of five, ten, fifteen minutes is a huge challenge. But that's why it's necessary. He is not only educated by speaking to the boys; he also educates them by teaching them to stay within a duration.

    The seventh: enhancing music in evaluation and exams, not as folklore appendix, but as a discipline capable of dialogue with history, literature, art, technology, civic education, science. An interdisciplinary interview that crosses the 20th century without music is mutilated. To talk about totalitarismi without hymns and sound propaganda, of migration without popular songs, of cultural industry without song, of cinema without soundtrack, of technology without digital production means to tell the world with a stopped ear.

    The eighth: investing in teacher training. The school changes if the living skills of those who live there change. We need serious paths on labs teaching, inclusion through music, sound technologies, vocality, overall music, guided listening, history of contemporary repertoires, interdisciplinary design. A music teacher today must be together musician, historian, educator, director of collective processes, cultural mediator. A complex figure, not an entertainer with an electronic register.

    The ninth: rethink the spaces. Music needs places. Soundproof classrooms, accessible tools, digital devices, sound libraries, environments for overall practice. You can't preach the centrality of music and then relegate it to unsuitable rooms, where every sound becomes trouble for the next class. Even school architecture says the value we attach to knowledge.

    The tenth: publicly recognize the cultural role of music in the formation of the citizen. This is perhaps the deepest point. As long as the music is thought as an accessory, every reform will remain fragile. You have to change imagination. Music does not serve to "make all musicians", as mathematics does not serve to become all mathematicians and literature does not serve to make all writers. It serves to form a part of human intelligence. It serves to give tools to understand the world.

    The unhappy fate of music in Italian schools is therefore not a fatality. It is the product of choices, omissions, mental habits. And what was produced can be transformed. But the courage to say that a school without authentically lived music is a poorer school. It can also work, compile documents, achieve goals, produce measurable results. But she will miss something essential: the ability to educate invisible complexity. Because music teaches this: that not all that matters is seen. Time can't be seen, but it governs us. Harmony cannot be seen, but it holds relations. Listening is not seen, but decides the quality of a community. A wrong note, in a set, is not only an individual error: it changes the landscape of all. Maybe the school should start from here. From this simple and dizzying evidence: we are always part of a common score.

    Restoring dignity to music means giving back depth to the school. It means remembering that educating does not only mean transmitting information, but to grant the human being with himself, with others, with memory, with the future. A society that musically educates its children does not only produce better performers: it produces better listeners. And a good listener, in civil life, is already a less ferocious citizen, less manipulated, less alone.

    Music, in the Italian school, is still waiting to be taken seriously. Not like luxury. Not as a range. Not like a year-end party. But as one of the highest forms of knowledge.

    And perhaps the task of those who teach, play, study, write and still believe in the human power of art is precisely this: to prevent music from remaining a kind presence on the edge of the school. It is necessary to return it to the center, where it has always been in civilizations that have been able to think in great: next to the word, to the number, to the memory, to the formation of the soul. Because a school that does not teach to listen can also educate. But it'll be much harder to educate.

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  • The organ that raises: Marialuisa Veneziano charms Falconara

    By Claudia Valenti

    Marialuisa Veneziano
    (©Emiliano Tarsetti)

    A rough and moving evening, in which the music of Morandi, Bach, Guilmant and Liszt became a gesture of beauty, solidarity and community.

    Falconara Marittima (An), 9 June 2026

    ***

    You should ask yourself sometimes what you really want a crowd when filling a church to listen to an organ.

    Certainly not the noise, of which the world is already prodigal dispenser; not light leisure, which is born and dies with the same hurry; not the vanity of being there, because there are places in which also vanity, if it enters, is forced to lower the voice. On the evening of June 6, in the Church of Sant’Antonio da Padova of Falconara Marittima (An), a very numerous community — a full church, indeed filled, as rarely happens for an organ concert — seemed to look for something more ancient and more necessary: a reason to listen together.

    And that reason came with the first sound.

    It wasn't a simple start. It was as if the air, until that moment immovable, suddenly found a soul. The organ took voice and the church, which was already full of people, seemed to fill itself only then. Because there are tools that accompany thought, and others who call it to judgment. The organ belongs to the latter. He does not ask for distraction, does not give superficiality: he takes the silence of men and measures it.

    At the instrument, Marialuisa Veneziano, organist, pianist and musicologist, interpreter of rare intensity, able to combine a powerful technique with an even more difficult quality to find: the inner necessity of sound. He did not play to adorn the evening, nor to please the audience, nor to exhibit that mastery which also appeared evident from the early jokes. It sounded like those who know that every note, if not born from a truth, remains only a note; and that music, when it is not called to say something of man, becomes a useless luxury.

    The concert was promoted to Caritas, with the support of President Ondina Valeria Ghergut and the Franciscan friars community of the parish. And it is not a detail to put at the bottom, among the obligatory thanks. It is, on the contrary, the moral key to the evening. Because beauty, when she meets charity, stops being isolated contemplation and becomes work. And the Franciscan friars, with that laborious simplicity that often makes more than many proclamations, have opened the doors not only of a sacred building, but of a possibility: to show that a community can still gather around what it elevates.

    From left: the parish priest Father Leon, Marialuisa Veneziano, Marina Mancini
    (©Emiliano Tarsetti)

    To present the concert was Eleonora Tarsetti, and those who had careful eyes would immediately understand that his was not an ornamental presence. There are people who announce them only; others, instead, generate them before they even begin. Eleonora belongs to this second species, more rare and more precious. His voice, measured and participated, brought with him the silent story of a strong, operous friendship, not exhibited. A friendship that believed, organized, supported, prepared the way. Next to her, Marina Mancini has contributed with kindness and grace to lead the public through the evening, as those who accompany without ever oversight, offering to the words the discreet measure of the welcome. This also gave the concert a special tone: not the cold one of the official occasions, but the rarest one of the evenings treated with a light hand, in which every intervention prepares listening and invites the public to enter, step by step, in the deeper meaning of the event.

    Between Eleonora Tarsetti and Marialuisa Veneziano we felt that connection that does not need many statements, because it speaks through gestures. And in times when talent is not always kept — sometimes it is looked suspiciously, as if the light of others was a decrease in its own — It is good to see a friendship that does the opposite act: it does not turn out, does not hold, does not measure; it opens. Eleonora Tarsetti opened a door. And from that door that night, the music passed.

    Marialuisa Veneziano at the organ and Eleonora Tarsetti
    (©Emiliano Tarsetti)

    The program was not a sequence of songs, but a moral itinerary.

    With Giovanni Morandi and his Offer, the organ showed its Italian face, clear, cantabile, almost smiling in its composure. There was on that page a simple, not poor grace; a luminosity capable of combining the sacred measure with a more human, almost theatrical breath. Marialuisa Veneziano made it with finesse, without limestone, without weighting, letting the sound walk in the church as a morning light. It was the right beginning: not the inruption of the sublime, but its announcement.

    Then Bach came. And when Bach really enters a church, he never enters as a guest. Get on the ground.

    The Touch and escape in minor king (BWV 565), so famous to be often consumed by habit, that evening he found his original severity. It was not the "famous" page that the public recognizes with satisfaction; it was a call. The Toccata has torn the space with a force that seemed musical and moral together. The Escape, then, recomposed that shock in order, voice after voice, as if chaos was called to give reason for itself.

    Here the Venetian Master showed an extraordinary mastery. The organ technique, in its complexity of hands, feet, registers, sound balance and control of acoustics, was safe, clear, dominated. But the real merit was another: that technique did not ask to be admired. Served. He claimed. He was carrying. It was like a column hidden inside a building: who looks admiring the time, but the time would not hold without that column. Thus it was the virtuosity of Venice: not vanity, but architecture.

    In Bach, his interpretation took the breath of the necessary things. Every voice of escape seemed to advance with its own dignity, and all together they built that miracle that only Bach does so naturally: transforming thought into emotion without betraying either one or another. The church listened real. And there are immobilities worth more than many applauses.

    With Alexandre Guilmant and the Symphonie n°1 in D minor by organ, the speech became wider. The organ has assumed symphonic dimension, almost orchestral. Not only liturgical instrument, but sound world: imaginary brass, invisible arches, luminous masses, deep shadows. French writing demanded greatness, but greatness is a dangerous matter: in less experienced hands it becomes weight, rhetoric, noise. Venetian, however, has been able to breathe. The sound widened without overturning; it climbed without crushing; it filled without confusing.

    It was, that, one of the moments in which the nature of the interpreter was better understood: a musician capable of power, but not in love with power; able to make the space tremble, but without losing the modesty of detail. And the smell, in art, is not weakness. It is the custody of greatness.

    Finally Franz Liszt.

    Here the evening entered a harsher, more burning, almost prophetic region. The Präludium und Fugue über It is not only a tribute to the genius of Eisenach: it is a struggle with the name, with the memory, with the inheritance, with that absolute that Liszt pursued throughout his life, now with the impetus of the virtuoso, now with the restlessness of the penitent. On this page the music is not limited to proceeding: search, question, rush, go back. Marialuisa Veneziano has entered there without satisfaction. He did not make Liszt an exercise of skill, although the difficulty was evident and very high. He made a play of it. Every passage seemed to bring with it a question: what remains of man when he entrusts his name to music? What remains of pain when it is transformed into form? What remains of fatigue when it becomes beauty?

    In Liszt, the artist appeared in his fullness. Not only the performer from the safe technique; not only the scholar who knows the internal structure of the songs; but the interpreter who risks something of himself. There are correct executions, there are brilliant executions, and then there are executions that seem to have gone through a life before arriving to the public. The Venetian one belonged to this last category. He didn't just produce sound: he delivered it.

    And the audience, in a church now almost a single being listening, received.

    It could be said that applause was warm, and that would be true. One could say that participation was great, and it would still be true. But there are smaller truths, and for this reason more revealing. One of these happened when, in the still vibrant silence after music, a very young voice shouted:

    "Brava prof!"

    You cannot invent a better phrase. No critic, no presenter, no release could have said more with so little.

    "Brava prof!": two words only, but inside there was the whole evening seen from the eyes of a young man. There was the affectionate amazement of those who recognize, in their teacher, not only the daily figure of the school, but the artist capable of shaking a church. There was the tenderness of a generation that, when it is not educated only to noise, still knows how great it is. There was evidence that music, when it is true, does not remain closed in titles and skills: it also comes there where technical language does not serve, because it speaks the heart.

    That cry didn't break the silence. He did.

    He entered the solemnity of the evening a simple, clear, irresistible note of life. And perhaps it was at that moment that the concert showed its deepest meaning: not to separate the top from the daily, but to unite them. Bach and school. Liszt and affection. Caritas and virtuosity. The Franciscan friars and the crowd. The friendship of Eleonora and the voice of a boy. Everything, for a moment, together.

    Marialuisa Veneziano during the execution (©Emiliano Tarsetti)

    This is the power of music when he meets a community: he reassembles what life often divides.

    The evening of 6 June had, in fact, a beauty not only artistic, but civil. Caritas, President Ondina Valeria Ghergut, Franciscan friars and those who made the event possible remembered that solidarity is not only an answer to the emergency, but an education of the gaze. Help also means creating places where man can feel part of something again. A church full for an organ concert is not only a success of public: it is a sign. And the signs, when they are honest, are worth more than the statements.

    In this sign, Eleonora Tarsetti had the discreet and decisive role of those who know how to recognize before others. But to say only this would be little. There are people who do not come to life to occupy space, but to return it; not to ask for light, but to allow others not to be afraid of it. Eleonora, in this evening, was exactly this: a presence able to believe without intruding, to support without holding, to prepare the way without pretending to be the way.

    Not all friendships are generative. Some consulate, others accompany; the highest, however, make things happen. They are those friendships that see when the world distracts, that guard when others disperse, that do not return before the greatness of the other because they do not live it as a threat, but as a gift. At a time when too many energies are consumed to resize, contain, extinguish what exceeds the common measure, a friendship that promotes beauty becomes almost a countercurrent act.

    Eleonora did this: she believed in a light and prepared her space. He realized that a concert could become something more than a musical evening; he could become a meeting, charity, memory, recognition. He brought his care within the organization of the event, but above all he brought that rare form of trust that does not need clamor to be decisive. Because sometimes the greatest things do not arise from those who raise their voices, but from those who know how to say, with firmness mild: "this beauty must happen".

    So the concert became more than a concert. He became a small parable about recognition.

    And in the middle of this parable remains the figure of Marialuisa Veneziano. An artist who does not ask for indulgence, because he possesses the tools of rigour; but who does not take refuge even in rigour, because he knows that art without soul is only well dressed discipline. Its execution has combined precision and fire, control and abandonment, thought and vibration. He made the organ not a monument, but a living creature.

    There was, in his way of playing, something we could call responsibility for beauty. Every song seemed brought to the public not as personal possession, but as a gift. Morandi with his grace; Bach with his ordained abyss; Guilmant with its solemn breadth; Liszt with his spiritual fever. Each page became a stage, and each stage allowed not only the composer, but also the interpreter: his culture, his strength, his history, his ability to transform fatigue into form.

    When the last vibration dissolved, the church did not immediately return to normal. No place returns identical after being crossed by a necessary music. The walls seemed to hold something again; the faces of the public brought that particular light that appears when you received more than you expected.

    Then what happens in true evenings cannot be commanded or predicted: the public stands.

    The applause, already long and grateful, has become a full, warm, almost liberating standing ovation. Not only the tribute to a successful execution; was the recognition of something that had touched deeper. The viewers did not applaud only the technique, although extraordinary, nor only the strength of the songs: applauded the experience lived, the emotion received, the feeling of being carried by hand into a higher place.

    And precisely in the final greetings, when an artist could easily take refuge in the pride of success, Marialuisa Veneziano chose instead the most difficult and brightest way: that of humility.

    He thanked the public with simple words, but capable of moving. "The artist without the public is nothing, because music does not live in the solitary gesture of those who perform it, but in the encounter with those who welcome it. Music needs humanity, people willing to listen, to get excited, to recognize each other through sound."

    It was a moment of rare truth.

    After Bach, Guilmant and Liszt, after the power of the organ and the intensity of the evening, those words brought everything back to its purest root: the music does not belong to the artist as a possession, but passes through the artist as a gift. And a gift exists only when someone receives it.

    The standing ovation, then, is no longer just an applause standing, but an answer. The audience returned to the artist what he had received; and the artist, with humility, handed back to the public the very meaning of music. In that dialogue without score, made of hands, shiny eyes and gratitude, perhaps the deepest meaning of the evening has been fulfilled.

    And perhaps this is the right word: gratitude.

    Recognize towards Caritas and friars, for making the church an open house. Recognize towards Eleonora Tarsetti, for believing and building. Recognize towards Marina Mancini, for having guided the public with grace and kindness through the passages of the evening. Recognize towards the public, for having filled not only a space, but a silence. Recognize to that young man who, with his "Brava prof!", delivered his most innocent and true phrase to the evening. Finally, she recognizes Marialuisa Veneziano, for having remembered that music, when born from study, pain, faith and dedication, can still perform the most difficult miracle: to make men feel less alone.

    We do not know if everyone, coming out of the church, has been able to accurately say what they had heard. Perhaps some will have appointed Bach, others Liszt, others the power of the organ, others still the full church or the emotion of that young cry. But it is not always necessary to give a name to the things that change. Sometimes you just take them away.

    On June 6, in Falconara, many entered the church for a concert.

    They came out with a memory.

    And memory, when it is made of beauty, friendship and charity, resembles a form of grace.

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  • Marialuisa Veneziano, when the organ becomes breath of the soul

    SABATO 6 JUNE 2026 TO THE CHURCH OF SANT’ANTONIO FROM THE MARITTIMA FALCONARA PADOVA, A SERATA IN CHOSE THE GREAT ORGANISTICAL REPERTORIO INCONTRAL SOLIDARITY, THE FRANCE SPIRITUALITY and the SILENTIAL FORZA SILENZIOSA OF AMICIZIA.

    The concert poster Saturday 6 June 2026

    By Claudia Valenti

    Falconara Marittima, 3 June 2026

    The organ is not an instrument that simply sounds. It is a tool that you cross. He needs hands, of course, of feet, of study, of control, of a very strict technique; but above all he needs a vision. Because the organ, more than any other instrument, gives nothing to the surface: it amplifies what the interpreter is. If there is empty inside, it returns empty. If there is thought, it returns architecture. If there is soul inside, then the sound becomes destiny of the air.

    On June 6th, at the Church of Sant’Antonio da Padova in Falconara Marittima, the public will be able to listen to the Maestro Marialuisa Veneziano, organist, pianist, musicologist, cultural journalist and music diffuser, in a concert born from the encounter between art, spirituality and solidarity.

    Marialuisa Veneziano is a rare artist: graduated in Piano at the Conservatory "Santa Cecilia" in Rome, built over time a path in which interpretation, research, writing and dissemination are never separate compartments, but parts of a same vocation. He played in contexts of particular prestige, even on occasions linked to the spiritual and institutional life of the Church, including moments connected to the pontificates of Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. The concert career has accompanied an intense musicological, journalistic and educational activity, until the foundation and direction of the cultural title "Le Apeiron", a place of reflection on music, art and thought. But what strikes, meeting it, is not only the resume. It is the not common understanding of humility and artistic greatness. Venetian speaks of music with almost religious respect, but without rigidity; with deep culture, but without satisfaction. He is an artist who knows the hard discipline of study and together with the human fragility that every true interpretation brings with it. Its organistic technique, solid, refined, able to govern with gloss keyboards, pedals, logs, sound planes and acoustic complexity of the instrument, is never performed as fine virtuosity to itself: it becomes a means to dig, to say, to illuminate. The concert on June 6 will also be a community gesture. Behind the evening is the work of those who believed in the value of an event capable of combining beauty and concrete participation: Caritas, pr

    On the eve of the concert, we met Marialuisa Veneziano for a real, intense conversation, sometimes surprising, in which the musical program becomes an opportunity to talk about art, friendship, faith, resistance and personal destiny.

    • Teacher, the concert on June 6 was born in a community: Caritas, President Ondina Valeria Ghergut, the Franciscan friars of the Parish. What's the value for you?

    It has a huge value, because a concert so it never comes from one person. Of course, then on the instrument I am, with my responsibility, my study, my way of breathing inside the music. But first there is a network of people that makes the meeting possible. Caritas, Ondina president and the Franciscan friars community have done something deeply beautiful: they believed that a musical evening could become a gift for the falconian community. They made available not only a space, but a trust, a care, a rare availability. And when a religious and solidarity community opens its doors to music, it is not simply hosting an event: it is saying that man also needs beauty to remain human. I feel very grateful. The Franciscan friars carry with them an idea of simplicity and essentiality that moves me. St. Francis spoke to creation, poverty, light and the last. And at the bottom of the music, when it is true, does something like this: it does not impose, does not scream, but reaches. It comes where words often fail to arrive.

    • Often behind a concert there is not only the work of the artist, but also a silent plot of trust, meetings and friendships that make the event possible. How important is it for you to know that someone recognizes the value of an artistic project and chooses to promote it?

    It matters a lot, because a concert never arises only when the artist sits on the instrument. It was born much earlier: from trust, from intuition, from someone who looks beyond the surface and understands that an artistic project can become an opportunity for beauty, meeting and good. In this path, Eleonora Tarsetti had a fundamental role, a person deeply linked to the parish reality and the falconarean community, who believed in the strength of this musical proposal. It was she who realized that an organ concert could not only be an event cultural, but a moment of recollection, sharing, opening to the city. He recognized a possibility and chose to take care of it, with discretion, care and determination. Here, for me this word is decisive: recognize. We often live in environments where talent is not accompanied, but supervised; where competence is not valued, but resized; where light bears are sometimes invited, with a lot of education and little size, to lower the flame not to disturb the surrounding darkness. There are working realities that should nourish people and instead consume them; places where we talk a lot about collaboration, but we practice too often the subtle art of shutting down. For this, when you meet someone who does the opposite gesture — that does not turn out, does not diminish, does not fear, does not hold — you feel almost physically the difference. Eleonora did this: he saw, believed, opened a road. He did not ask the music to regret to remain in a mediocre measure; he wanted, on the contrary, that it could reach the community in its fullness. There are people who come to life not making noise, but moving something. They do not enter with great proclaims, they do not promise seas and mountains: they simply see. And when a person really sees you, especially when you struggle to recognize yourself entirely, he does a huge gesture. Because being seen does not mean being praised: it means being understood in one's own truth. In an artistic path you study so much, you work so much, you fall, you get up. You also learn to resist those environments where quality is accepted as a threat instead of as a wealth; to those contexts where who knows how to do is often looked with suspicion, as if preparation He doesn't ask you to continually prove who you are. She recognizes you. And that recognition becomes a home. Eleonora, in this concert, was also this: not only a friend, not only an organizational presence, but a person capable of transforming trust into action. He believed in me, he proposed to me, worked for the idea to take shape and arrive at Caritas, the Franciscan friars community, parish, people. He did all this with a care that does not belong to simple efficiency, but to something more rare: love for what is built. For me this is a very high form of friendship: do not hold the other in the shadows, but accompany it towards the light. Don’t just say "I’m close to you," but make sure that what the other brings inside can meet the world. True friendship does not level, does not envy, does not fear the greatness of others. True friendship can say: "Go, this must live." That's why this concert also bears its invisible name. Not as an official signature, perhaps, but as a deep presence. Because there are events that are realized thanks to programs, permissions, spaces; and then there are events that are realized because someone, first of all, has been able to say: "it is worth it". I'm grateful for opening a door. And certain doors, when they are opened by a true friend and a person who loves their community, do not only lead to a concert: they lead to a greater form of shared destiny. In the end, perhaps, the most beautiful sense of this evening is also here: show that where any

    • The organ is an imposing, almost superhuman instrument. What is your personal relationship with this tool?

    It is a relationship of love and fear. Fear in the noblest sense: respect, threshold, dizziness. The organ is not a tool you can possess. You can study it for years, you can know the technique, you can govern hands and feet, you can work on phrasing, recording, form; but in the end each organ remains a new encounter. Each instrument has a character, a voice, a resistance, a secret. And every church still transforms it. With the piano the sound is born under the fingers. On the other hand, the sound is also born elsewhere: in the air, in the reeds, in the space, in the distance between you and what comes back. You press a button and the sound answers you from another point, as if it comes from a larger area than you. For this reason the organ continually educates me to humility. Remember that it's not enough Good. You have to listen. You have to wait. You have to understand when to drive and when to let yourself be guided.

    Marialuisa Veneziano at the organ
    • The public often imagines the organ as a severe, liturgical, distant instrument. Is the evening program gonna try to break this idea?

    Yes, very much. The organ is certainly linked to the liturgy, spirituality, the great sacred tradition. But reducing it to this would be like looking at the sea and saying that it is just water. The organ can be monumental, but also intimate. It can have the power of an entire orchestra and, a moment later, the delicacy of a solo voice. It can evoke prayer, but also dance; it can be theatre, meditation, fire, shadow, joy. The program is thought like a journey between these possibilities. I don't want the audience to witness a sequence of songs like a showcase. I would like you to enter a story: every music page will be a room, a landscape, a different question.

    • Is there an existential question that music asks her every time she sits in the instrument?

    Yes. "What are you really looking for? " I think every artist, sooner or later, has to answer this question. It is not enough to look for applause, it is not enough to seek perfection, it is not enough to seek recognition. They're human things, of course, but they can't be the center. When I sit at the organ, especially in a sacred place, I feel that the question is more radical. Looking for beauty? Am I looking for truth? Am I looking for consolation? Am I trying to turn something into a sound that can also speak to others? Music puts you in front of yourself. You can't lie too long. Sooner or later the sound reveals everything: your strength, your fear, your discipline, your wounds, your faith in life. Maybe that's why I keep looking for her. Because music doesn't allow me to become superficial.

    • She possesses an organ technique of great solidity, but in her interpretations it seems that the technique never wants to show itself. What is the relationship with virtuosity?

    The technique is indispensable. Without technique there is no freedom, there is only intention. And the intention alone is not enough. The organ requires huge control: hands, feet, logs, instrument response times, acoustics, voice balance. It is a wonderful and complex machine. We must have clarity, coordination, mental resistance, precision. But the technique, if it remains end to itself, becomes gymnastics. I think the highest virtuosity is what disappears within the meaning. The audience may not think: "how difficult is what you're doing." You must feel that difficulty has become an expression. The technique is like grammar of a language: necessary, but no one moves for grammar alone. It moves when that grammar becomes poetry.

    • In your path you also knew obstacles, resistances, attempts to resize. Was music also a form of defense?

    More like a form of truth. The defense sometimes stiffens; the truth instead stands. Every person who does something seriously encounters, sooner or later, those who try to diminish, to soil, to remove light. It's part of life, though it shouldn't. But the important thing is not to become like what hurts us. I think serious work has a louder voice than noise. Those who try to break someone often forget something simple: if a person has deep roots, not Just shake a little wind to drop it. And if art is authentic, sooner or later it finds the way to speak. I prefer to respond with the studio, with music, with quality. It is a form of elegance, but also of survival. The organ, in this, is a great teacher: it does not discuss with noise. It's high.

    • She is also musicologist, cultural journalist and divulner. How much does it matter to tell the music, as well as to play it?

    It matters a lot. Music needs to be heard, but also accompanied. Not because the audience is not able to understand, but because every listening can become deeper if someone opens a door. Divulge does not mean simplifying until trivializing. It means making complexity accessible without betraying it. I always thought culture shouldn't be on a pedestal. He has to go down among people, not to lower himself, but to raise everyone's gaze. Music is a form of thought. It teaches us time, wait, relationship between the parties, silence. In a society that consumes everything quickly, educating to listen is almost a revolutionary act. And maybe even therapeutic.

    • Having played in important places and occasions, also linked to solemn moments of the Church, what changes when playing in a local community?

    It doesn't change responsibility. In fact, sometimes it increases. Playing in prestigious contexts is certainly exciting. These are experiences that mark, which remind you of the greatness of a tradition, the symbolic weight of certain places, the history that passes through music. But a local community has something equally valuable: proximity. Falconara won't play for an abstract audience. I'll be honored for people who live that territory, that parish, that community. People who will perhaps enter with the labors of the day, with their stories, their worries, their hopes. And music will have to talk to them, not to an ideal idea of audience. This is beautiful for me. Because the great music does not belong only to the great stages. It belongs to every place where someone is willing to listen to it.

    • What would happen in the audience during the concert?

    I'd like a little inner shift to happen. Not necessarily something clamorous. Sometimes the most true transformations are silent. I wish someone, listening, would find a forgotten thought. Let someone else feel a form of peace. That someone else would go out and say, "I didn't think the organ could talk to me like this." Authentic music does not invade. Work inside. Deposit. Continue after the last note. And perhaps the most beautiful concert is not what ends with an applause, but what continues in the memory of who was there.

    • If you were to define the concert on June 6 with an image, what would you choose?

    An open door. A door opened by Caritas, President Ondina, Franciscan friars, Eleonora, the community. A door through which music can enter and exit, because beauty should not be held. It must be shared. And then an inner door. Because the organ, when it resounds in a church, seems to open something above us, but also within us. It reminds us that we are not only meant to run, defend, produce, endure. We are also made to listen, to move, to recognize us in something bigger.

    The concert on June 6 is therefore announced as much more than a musical appointment. It will be an evening in which the falconareus community will be able to meet a thick artist, capable of combining culture, technique and human intensity; but also a woman who, behind the solidity of the path and the strength of interpretation, preserves an increasingly rare quality: the humility of those who know that music never belongs entirely to those who perform it.

    In M° Marialuisa Veneziano live the rigor of the performer, the depth of the scholar and the passion of the disseminator. But, above all, there emerges an obstinate fidelity to beauty. A faithfulness that does not ignore the difficulties, crosses them. He doesn't deny pain, he transforms it. It does not respond to noise with other noise, but with a higher note. And maybe this is the strongest message of the evening: music, when born from a true need, is never decoration. It is a form of spiritual resistance. It is the way a community gathers, a friendship becomes gesture, a cause finds voice, and an artist delivers not only his talent to the public, but the clearest part of his history. On June 6, in the Church of St. Anthony of Padua, the organ will not only be heard. He'll be inhabited. And, at least for one evening, his breath will become the breath of all.

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  • The threshold of water, the voice of man

    The threshold of water, the voice of man

    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.

    Alessio Allegrini

    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 Composer Andrea Strappa

    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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  • Where the wind finds the soul

    Where the wind finds the soul

    With Luigi Piovano, Silvia Careddu and the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, "Voices of the Wind" becomes a meditation on the sound born from the invisible and returns to the heart.

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    St. Julian’s, Malta – 10 May 2026

    The wind is the most mysterious creature in the world. He has no body, yet every body recognizes him. He has no voice, yet he can complain between the cracks, singing on the water, fragrant among the leaves, omen in the closed rooms. It does not belong to anyone, it does not let itself be retained, it cannot be possessed; and yet, when it passes, nothing remains exactly as it was before.

    The music resembles him in this: it comes from the invisible and the invisible returns. It lives in the air, but it is not only air. It is vibration, breath, time that takes body for an instant and then melts, leaving in the soul a deeper trace of many visible things. That's why "Voices of the Wind", the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra concert conducted by Luigi Piovano, with Silvia Careddu at the flute, in the Grand Ballroom of the Radisson Blu Resort in St Julian’s, it appears as something more than a musical program: it appears as a meditation on the very essence of sound.

    The wind, in this poetic architecture, is not a simple theme. It's a secret law. It is the principle that unites what might seem far away: Responsibility by Matteo Rubini, presented in the world premiere; the Concerto for flute and string orchestra by André Jolivet; Symphony No. 40 in G minor K. 550 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Three different worlds, three epochs, three languages, and yet one question: how can the invisible be voiced? How can what has no matter become form, emotion, destiny?

    The Grand Ballroom at Radisson Blu Resort in St. Julian’s, Malta

    The concert moves like an inner novel. It does not proceed by brusque combinations, but by successive transformations. At first there is the material that is still enigmatic, still collected in its own sound womb. Then that matter becomes thin, air, breath, invocation. Finally the breath enters the great classical form and discovers a wound: Mozart, that is, beauty when it stops being ornament and becomes consciousness of pain.

    The centre of this journey is Luigi Piovano. Not simply director, but interpreter in the highest and oldest sense of the term: he who crosses a text to reveal not only the structure, but the spiritual necessity. In him the directory gesture never appears as an exercise of power. There is no will of domination, there is no spectacular fulfillment, there is no anxiety to leave a personal footprint that sometimes ends up obscuring music. There is, however, a more rare form of authority: that of those who can listen so deeply to be able to drive.

    Its direction seems to be born from a silent pact with sound. They rained not force the score: interrogates her. Not the capacity of external intentions: it seeks its inner heartbeat. It does not turn on emotion with external gestures: it lets it rise from the form itself, like water from a hidden source. It is this, perhaps, its most seductive quality: to make discipline a form of ardour, and of anger a form of thought.

    The Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, under this guide, does not appear as a simple executive companion, but as a sensitive organism. The sound of the arches, in particular, seems to become mobile matter: now dense and terrestrial, now transparent, now restless, now suspended. Piovano knows the nature of the bows not far away, but from the inside; he knows the weight of the ham on the rope, the point where the pressure becomes voice, the thin threshold beyond which the sound risks to stiffen or, on the contrary, to evaporate. For this reason he manages to obtain from the orchestra not only precision, but breath.

    And it is from the breath of the arches that the journey begins.

    Responsibility by Matteo Rubini stands as an initial threshold, and there could be no more suitable threshold. The title belongs to the alchemic imagination: the Responsibility is the double creature, the union of opposites, the figure in which what was separated finds a new identity. It is matter and spirit, male and female, light and shadow, one and multiple. Already in this word is contained a philosophy of music: because every sound, in the end, is union of opposites. It comes from a physical gesture, but it produces an immaterial effect; it belongs to time, but it seeks the eternal; it vibrates in a concrete space, but it opens up interior places that no geography can measure.

    Sharpened to the string orchestra, this idea acquires a particular force. The arches are, by their nature, alchemic instruments. They need more concrete matter — wood, ropes, arch, hand, pressure — to generate something that immediately seems to get rid of matter. Their sound can be flesh and fog, nerve and light, body and ghost. In Responsibility, this duplexity becomes an expressive principle: the sound seems to seek a form while still remembering the chaos from which it comes.

    Piovano accompanies this birth with a cure that has something rabdomanti. It does not stiffen the page in a demonstration reading; it does not make it ostentatiously contemporary, as if the novelty coincides with the harshness. It allows her to breathe in its complexity. It brings out tensions, stratifications, internal planes; it lets the orchestra become a laboratory of metamorphosis. The Malta Philharmonic Orchestra responds with a careful, moldable sound, able to switch from compactness to rarefaction without losing intensity.

    At this moment the wind still has no recognizable voice. It's original energy. It is what moves the matter before matter can sing. It is the initial fremite of creation, the dark and powerful moment in which sound is not yet speech, but already contains in itself the desire to become it.

    From here the passage to Jolivet does not appear as a change of scene, but as a natural consequence. The matter that in Rubini sought form now finds its breath in the flute. The string orchestra, after being an alchemic laboratory, becomes a ritual landscape. The wind, which first stirred the sound substance from the inside, now concentrates in a luminous point: the human breath that passes through the flute and turns into invocation.

    Silvia Careddu to flute

    The Concerto for flute and string orchestra by André Jolivet thus occupies the spiritual center of the program. Jolivet does not conceive the flute as an instrument of simple grace, nor as a pastoral voice destined to embroide arabesque over an orchestral fabric. Its flute belongs to a more ancient, almost sacred dimension. It is a tool that seems to recall the time when music was not yet entertainment, nor encoded form, but magic gesture, prayer, man’s attempt to dialogue with what oversees it.

    In Jolivet the flute is exposed breath. It does not hide its body origin; on the contrary, it transfigures it. Every sound seems to be born of a primary need: inhale, exhale, call, respond. It is a song that preserves the memory of the body and, however, overcomes it, as if the breath, coming out of the instrument, stopped belonging to an individual and became the voice of something wider.

    Silvia Careddu enters this page as an essential figure. His role is not that of a soloist who stands on the orchestra for virtuosity or brilliance. It is something subtler and more difficult: it must embody the point where air becomes thought. The flute, in his hands, must be able to be light and wounded, lightness and restlessness, grace and sorrow. In Jolivet the technique can never remain surface: it has to burn without consuming, it has to become controlled fever, probation, singing that seems to be born from a remote place of the soul.

    Dialogue with the orchestra is then decisive. And here the passage from Rubini to Jolivet shows all his poetic intelligence: the arches that before were matter in transformation now become space of appearance. They do not simply accompany the flute; they surround it, wait for it, provoke it, sometimes protect it. I am ground under a voice of air. I am shadowed because the light can be perceived. They are collective memory around a solitude that sings.

    Piovano builds this relationship with particular finesse. The balance between soloist and orchestra is never only a question of sound proportions; it is a question of musical thought. A less sensitive director could just not cover the flute. Piovano does more: creates emotional space so that the flute can mean. The orchestra retracts without emptying itself, sustains without restraining, participates without intruding. Careddu can move in a living landscape, not in front of an inert background.

    The result is a dramaturgy of breath. The flute rises, bends, turns thin, turns on; the bows respond with a sound matter that is now pulsated, now it becomes veiled, now it seems to hold under the surface an ancient energy. It is like witnessing a rite in which no one proclaims the sacred, but everything suggests it. The wind, here, finally has a voice. But not a domestic voice, not a peaceful voice. It's a rumor. A voice that does not comfort immediately, because first he wants to awaken.

    And after the rite, after the breath, after this ascent of the air towards the song, Mozart arrives. But not as a return to serenity. Not as a reassuring approach to classical clarity. The passage to Symphony No. 40 in G minor K. 550 It is much deeper: it is the moment when the breath, after being voiced, enters the form and discovers its restlessness.

    Mozart comes as a light, yes, but a light that knows the shadow. Lent is one of the most famous works of the entire musical history, and this celebrity often risks betraying it. Familiarity can become a fog: we believe we know what we recognize. But the Symphony no. 40 is not a page to be recognized; it is a page to be subjected, in the noblest sense of the term. You have to let yourself be reached by his trouble, his fever, his painful grace.

    The famous attack of the first movement is not a theme that presents itself to the world with safety. It's a tremor. It seems to be born already on the run, like a thought that can't stand still in itself. The melodic line has the naturalness of the breath, but a restless, anxious, almost pursued breath. Under the perfection of writing, under the balance of proportions, a dark current runs. Mozart does not cry the pain: it makes it inevitable.

    Here is the great interpretative difficulty. Mozart does not allow sentimental abandonment or academic coldness. If you charge it too much, you betray it; if you wash it too much, you kill it. Piovano seems to be at the most difficult and true point: the one in which the form remains clear, but lets see the wound that it contains. It does not romanticize Mozart from the outside; it frees hidden romance. It does not add pathos; it removes what would prevent authentic pathos from breathing.

    The Malta Philharmonic Orchestra is called, in this symphony, to a very high exercise of emotional discipline. In the first movement, the bows must support a continuous nervous pulsation, without turning it into concitation. Energy must advance, but without losing elegance; tension must grow, but without becoming an emphasis. Each sentence requires a control of the phrasing that is both rational and ardent: because in Mozart the most intense feeling often lives in the purest line.

    TheAndante opens another space, but not an easy peace. It is a thoughtful sweetness, an oblique light, a tenderness that seems to know already to be threatened. Here the orchestra must sing without abandoning itself; it must make the Mozartian calm feel that it is not absence of pain, but pain kept in shape. They rained, on a similar page, can reveal their taste for the measure: that measure that does not turn off emotion, but makes it more penetrating, like a word called low voice at the exact moment.

    The Minu is not an elegant parentheses. It is a severe dance, almost sculpted, in which the 18th century grace stiffens into something more shady. Here the rhythm must not float: it must affect. It must show how dance, in this symphony, is crossed by a more serious force. And the Final, with its lucid and relentless race, it achieves not a liberation, but a necessity. It does not seem to end a speech: it seems to seal a destiny.

    Luigi Piovano leads the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra

    And then the whole itinerary becomes clear. Responsibility was the birth of sound matter, its restless alchemy. Jolivet It was the time when that matter was breathing, and the breath invocation. Mozart is the point where breathing becomes consciousness, and consciousness discovers its fragility. The wind passes through the three works changing face: first primordial force, then breath ritual, finally inner motion of the soul.

    This gradualness is the true soul of the program. Nothing is random. Rubini prepares Jolivet because the string orchestra, after exploring its subject, can open itself to the voice of the flute. Jolivet prepares Mozart because the breath, once become a song, can enter the highest architecture of the form. Mozart collects both and transfigures them: matter and breath become thought, thought becomes destiny, destiny becomes music.

    In this design, Luigi Piovano appears as the secret narrator. He does not tell with words, but with proportions, breaths, transitions, sound weights, silences. His way of directing possesses something deeply romantic, not because it induces sentimentalism, but because it conceives music as a revelation of interiority. The most true romance, in fact, is not excess of tears: it is the ability to feel the infinite in a finite form.

    Piovano directs as he knows that every note has a responsibility. There is no superfluous gesture, there is no complete abandonment. Even when the music turns on, it seems to be guided by an inner clarity. Yet this lucidity does not cool: on the contrary, it moves. Because what really touches is not the emotion shown, but the one held to the point where it becomes necessary. The heart, sometimes, beats stronger not when it is assaulted, but when it is recognized.

    The Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, in this perspective, becomes the body through which the thought of Piovano becomes audible. His most precious quality is not only in precision, but in the ability to change emotional state. In Rubini, the orchestra becomes a cangiant matter, almost mineral and vibrating together; in Jolivet, it becomes a ritual landscape, able to breathe around the flute; in Mozart, it rediscovers the clarity of form, but without losing the human temperature conquered in the previous path. It is as if the orchestra learned, during the concert, to speak three different languages of the same truth.

    Luigi Piovano on the podium with the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra

    And Silvia Careddu, at the centre of this journey, represents the most fragile and brightest step. Its flute is the threshold between the orchestra and the soul, between the matter of the bows and the Mozartian consciousness. Without that breath, the journey from Rubini to Mozart would be less necessary. Jolivet instead becomes the bridge: the page in which the air acquires a face and prepares the listener to understand that, in Mozart, even the most perfect form is nothing but breath rendered immortal.

    The Malta Philharmonic Orchestra

    The frame of Malta adds an almost symbolic resonance to the concert. An island is a romantic place par excellence: separate and open, collected and crossed, stops in its stone and delivered to the winds. The Mediterranean, with its lights and shadows, with its memory of departures, landings, shipwrecks and returns, seems to resonate ideally around this program. Outside, the real wind of the sea; inside, the transfigured wind of music. Outside, the air that passes through the water; inside, the sound that passes through the bodies.

    But the most important place, in the end, is not the hall. He is the listener. Because music, when it is really such, is not limited to happening before us: it happens in us. Enter a region where thought is not yet a word and feeling is not yet a confession. He finds us before we explained ourselves. Perhaps this is his highest power: not simply saying what we feel, but revealing what we did not know to try.

    "Voices of the Wind" thus becomes an almost prophetic title. The voices of the wind are not only those of the instruments. They are the voices of matter, breath, memory, form, wound. They are the voices of everything in music passes without staying and, just passing, remains forever.

    Eventually, the wind can't be seen. But no one, after hearing it, can deny that it existed. So music: vanishes in the air, yet it continues to vibrate where the air no longer arrives. It remains in thought, in the body, in a sort of nostalgia without precise object. It's like a call. Like a promise. Like a wound that doesn't hurt because it finally found its shape.

    And in this form — built by the vision of Luigi Piovano, by the breath of Silvia Careddu, by the changing voice and participation of the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra — the concert finds its deepest truth: music is not evasion from the world, but revelation of its secret. It does not leave us from life; it returns more intense, more fragile, more worthy of being listened.

    When the last note turns out, the void remains. It remains that particular silence that follows only the necessary experiences: a inhabited silence, thoughtful, almost grateful. That's where the concert continues. No more in the instruments, no more in the room, no more in the manager's gesture, but inside those who really listened.

    Because the wind passes.
    Music passes.
    But what they have moved in us, that not: that continues to tremble.

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  • The form of time and the voice of the soul

    The form of time and the voice of the soul

    From the hypnotic breath of Glass to the restless light of Beethoven, Piovano, FORM and Scolastra give form to an experience in which time does not pass: interrogates us, hurts us, returns us.

    By Marialuisa Veneziano

    Ravenna, 30 April 2026

    I don't know if the music really starts when the first sound comes out of silence. Sometimes, I think, it begins first, much earlier: in a question that accompanies us without which we know to give her name, in a restlessness that seems not to have object, in that dark and sweet present so, entering a concert hall, we not only go to listen to something, but to seek — perhaps without confessing to ourselves — a higher form of presence. You go to a concert bringing with you the noise of the day, tiredness, some thought left in half, a small penalty that you do not see, and then it happens that, gradually, all this is called to collect from a different order, more severe and more merciful. It is then that music does not console in the easy sense of the word; rather, it returns us to ourselves with an intensity that almost moves.

    It is with this provision that I have reconsidered the dialogue with Luigi Piovano. Not an interview in the usual sense, not that ordered sequence of questions and answers that often serves more to those who write than to those who read, but a progressive approach to the center of a thought. Piovano does not speak of music as an object to be illustrated. Music, in his words, is never out of him; it passes through you. And this is perhaps what strikes before the content: the naturalness with which technical experience, interpretative intelligence and a rare form of humility gather in one voice. Violoncellist and conductor, for over twenty years the first soloist cello of the Orchestra of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, an artist who has crossed the symphonic, cameristic and solo repertoire with a familiarity conquered in the body before even that in the study, Piovano brings on the podium an uncommon quality: he does not direct "over" the orchestra, but seems to listen from within, as who knows the physical difficulty of the sound

    Luigi Piovano

    When I proposed to him to read the combination between Philip Glass and Ludwig van Beethoven not as a simple alternation of styles, but as a comparison between two forms of time — on the one hand the cyclical, contemplative time, on the other the dramatic time of becoming — Piovano did not try to reduce, explain, correct. He welcomed that intuition with a phrase that had the value of an open door: «You couldn't express it better». And yet, as he said, he felt that the point was not to find a happy formula. The point was to enter that place where time is no longer chronology, it is no longer measure, it is no longer the indifferent succession of instants, but it becomes substance of experience, living matter of listening. Glass and Beethoven, so far away in history, meet right there: not in the appearance of language, but in a radical question. What happens to man when time stops being something that passes and becomes something that passes through it?

    From this question comes the deep meaning of the program. Because a great concert program is never only a choice of songs; it is a form of thought, and sometimes a form of destiny. It could be said that Glass and Beethoven belong to two unconcilable worlds: one to minimalist modernity, to reiterate structures, to hypnotic geometries of the second twentieth century; the other to the heart of the great symphonic tradition, to dialectic tension, to the dramaturgy of form. But it would be too comfortable and therefore insufficient. The history of music is not a museum ordered for separate rooms: it is rather a plot of calls, anticipations, returns, wounds that reopen under other light. And Piovano, with great clarity, lets it be understood when he observes that in Beethoven himself, even where less we would expect it, already lives a force of reiteration, a ability to build worlds through minimal, insistent, necessary cells. Even four hits can become architecture, thought, destiny.

    In the Tyrol Concert of Glass, time does not impose itself as a story, but as an environment. He does not lead the listener from one point to another, he does not take it by hand according to the traditional logic of exposure, development, resolution. Instead it surrounds him, wraps him up, tests him. The piano beginning, in the words of Piovano, seems almost to bring with it a Schubertian perfume, as if for a moment a nineteenth-century memory faces the threshold of a modern building. It is a precious suggestion, because it does not serve to "romanticize" Glass, but to recognize how music, even when it seems new, often carries in itself ancient ghosts, remote fingerprints, voices that have not finished talking. Then, however, that initial promise is immediately transformed: the icing logic enters, that sort of oblique smile of repetition, that serious game in which what returns is never really equal to before.

    The word "repetition", applied to Glass, is as inevitable as dangerous. Inevitable, because his writing lives of cells that return, of pulsations that insist, of figures that seem to rewrite themselves. Dangerous, because it risks to reduce to mechanism what is instead a transformation of perceptive consciousness. Repetition, in great music, is not poverty of invention: it is spiritual proof. He asks us if we can stay, if we can hear what changes in the minimum, if we know that even what seems identical is altered by the fact of returning. A pain that returns is never the same pain; a memory that returns is never the same memory; a note that returns is never the same note, because we, meanwhile, have changed.

    Piovano accurately identifies the most difficult point: the risk that reiteration becomes obsession, and that obsession becomes boring. It is a real risk, and precisely for this artistically fruitful. Glass’s music walks on a margin: on the one hand the trance, on the other the automatism; on the one hand the suspension of time, on the other its mechanical cancellation. The interpreter’s task is to prevent the machine from winning on life. It is not enough to keep time, it is not enough rhythmic cleansing, it is not enough an exact discipline, as indispensable. We need a breath. It is necessary to ensure that precision has blood, that the design has temperature, that the order does not become jealous. Piovano speaks of dynamics, of micro-adjustments, of balances, of those "baptets" that break the regularity and make the listening sober as a heart that for a moment stumbles and then finds its own rhythm.

    In this perspective, the FORM — Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana — has had the rare merit of not turning Glass into a device, but to return it flesh, breath, human temperature. It is easy, in a writing based on reiteration, to exchange accuracy for truth; but precision alone is not enough. He can become jealous. It can become surface. Here, instead, a more noble tension has been felt: that of an orchestra capable of keeping together the exactness of the design and the fragility of the living. Each section seemed to listen to the other; each entrance seemed to be born not from automatism, but from a shared need. In this sense, the FORM has not simply accompanied an interpretative path: it has inhabited it, offering to Piovano that living matter without which even the highest idea remains only intention.

    Inside this organism, Marco Scolastra's piano did not stand as a separate voice, nor as a narcissistic center of speech. It was rather an internal, thinking, mobile presence: a sound consciousness that crossed the orchestra and was in turn transformed. In the interview, they spoke of a cameristic approach, of a harmony built in proof and sharing; and it is precisely this word — sharing — to remain as a moral key before musical. Because where soloist, orchestra and conductor cease to contend with space and instead begin to breathe it together, music stops being execution and becomes community.

    When Beethoven takes the word, it is not a feeling of abandoning Glass, but of seeing the puzzle reflected in a more ancient and dramatic mirror. The Fourth Symphony is often referred to as a luminous bracket between two colossi, the Third and the Fifth; however, this definition, although convenient, is unfair. The Fourth is not minor: it is secret. He does not shout his own greatness, does not raise monuments, does not appear with the flagrant face of the Titanic Beethoven that the tradition, sometimes lazy, has given us. She smiles, says Piovano; but her smile comes from a shadow. And this phrase, in its simplicity, captures the essence of the whole symphony.

    The slow introduction, with those dark arches, is not a simple prelude. It's a moral threshold. Music seems to hold its breath, as if before showing it should cross an area of uncertainty. Beethoven, here, does not immediately give us a truth; he educates us to wait. And waiting, in music as in life, is one of the deepest forms of knowledge. Only those who really wait can receive what comes. When the Allegro opens, the light does not erase the shadow: the door with it, transfigures it. And then that smile is not naivety, but conquer; it is not carefree, but grace survives complexity.

    In the second movement, the wire with Glass becomes almost palpable. Piovano speaks of a rhythmic reiteration "worthy of minimalism", a pulsation that follows the entire movement and constitutes not an ornament, but a deep structure. Here Beethoven seems to remind us that the return does not only belong to minimalist modernity: it belongs to music itself, and first to life. The heart repeats. The pass repeats. The breath repeats. Seasons repeat. But nothing, in this repetition, is never simply identical. Everything comes back with a difference. Beethoven's greatness lies in transforming this elementary truth into spiritual architecture: what returns does not imprison us, but leads us deeper.

    The third movement opens another landscape. Piovano tells it with images of land, almost with affection: a rustic and elegant farmer, a peasant who enters "all arranged", a rural world that is not picturesque, but deeply human. In that description, which may seem mild, there is an important reading. Beethoven is not only the poet of necessity, of struggle, of destiny knocking at the door; he is also the one who knows how to listen to the mint life, the dance, the popular step, the imperfect grace of the daily. His greatness is not in being always sublime, but in knowing that even simplicity can become sublime, if accepted in form.

    This is when the Fourth Symphony becomes a lesson against every simplification. Beethoven is not only titanism; it is not only storm. It is also smile, elegance, lightness, restrained irony, smell of tenderness. They rained, speaking of the Beethoven man, recalls the sweetness that appears in the letters, the complexity of a character that cannot be reduced to the cliché of the irascible genius. It is an important step, because the truest musicology does not consist in freezing composers in formulas, but in giving them back the contradiction, that is, life. Beethoven is great not because it is marble, but because in marble it continues to beat a heart.

    The final of the Fourth brings this vitality to a dizzying threshold. Writing runs, sparks, asks the bows and breaths an extreme lucidity, and yet it must not become pure virtuosity. Piovano speaks of a sort of oxymoron between the agonistic indication and the metronome, between the "not too much" and a speed that appears as a fucilage; and in this interpretative tension lies one of the most fascinating problems of music: the score is never a corpse to be respected, but a body to be brought back to life. We need fidelity and freedom, humility and decision, respect and risk. Those who direct must be in the midst of these forces without betraying any.

    Perhaps this is where the human path of Piovano becomes decisive. His gesture was born from a long custom with sound. He himself, in the interview, leads his direct view to life as an instrumentalist, to the years spent inside the orchestra, to the encounter with masters like Chung and Pappano, to the understanding that music is never an act of command, but an act of shared responsibility. It says a beautiful thing: experience does not prevent mistakes, but it helps to understand that sharing is fundamental. It is a thought that should be written at the entrance of every rehearsal room. Because overall music is not an indistinct democracy, but not even a tyranny of the gesture: it is a strong idea that is offered to others to become common.

    And here the artist meets the philosopher, even when he does not claim to be. Piovano speaks of humility and awareness. Humility in front of pages he defines perfect; awareness of having to do everything possible to make them live. It cites the teaching of the Greeks, the necessary imperfection so that the human eye can accept perfection, and recalls a sentence of Giulini: the best can become an enemy of good. In these words there is an ancient wisdom that goes beyond music. Every human work lives in this tension: to seek the maximum knowing that the maximum, if it becomes idolatry, can destroy what we were looking for. Perfection is not sterility; it is measured by the human.

    From this point of view, the concert is not entertainment. It is one of the last places where a community accepts to live together time without accelerating it. Piovano says it with words that they have nothing ornamental: after Covid we realized that it is not the same thing to put in front of a screen, even with the best audio apparatus. It is not the same perfume, it is not the same wait, it is not the same after. There is coffee, there is the spritz, there is comment, criticism, even gossip, says with a concreteness that makes smile because it returns to the rite its daily flesh; then the lights lower, enters the orchestra, enters the conductor, and "please there".

    This word, prayer, may seem excessive only to those who have never really listened. It is not necessarily religion, but recollection. Of a suspension of the ego. From that moment when a multitude of people, each with their own secret life, agrees to breathe in the same silence. In a world that multiplies sounds and impoverishes listening, the concert is a form of spiritual resistance. It does not distract us from life: it returns us to its depth. It teaches us that being present is still possible; that sharing a non-functional, non-productive time, not immediately spendable, is an almost revolutionary act.

    And then Glass and Beethoven, through Piovano, become more than one program: they become a meditation on existence. Glass teaches us that not all that comes back is prison; sometimes the return is the way to go deeper. Beethoven teaches us that becoming is not simple progress; it is a struggle between shadow and light, between weight and grace, between necessity and smile. One expands the time until we lose the measure; the other tends it to make it destiny. But both ask us the same thing: listening not only with the ear, but with that vulnerable area of being in which thought becomes emotion and emotion becomes knowledge.

    When the concert ends, the music doesn't really end. Piovano knows. When asked what is left after, he does not offer a rhetorical answer. It says that two elements remain: the pleasure of giving sound to a symphony, and then the other voice, more severe, the one that asks if you could have done better. It is a confession that moves because it is true. Every authentic artist lives in this slit: on the one hand gratitude, on the other the restless. On the one hand the applause, on the other the night in which one rethinks an attack, to an agreement, to a point where everything could be more just, more clear, more necessary.

    But perhaps this wound prevents music from becoming a profession only. Who no longer doubts, has already stopped looking. Who, after giving everything, still feels the call of a possible better, keeps his fidelity to beauty intact. And if this tension comes to the public, if someone comes out of the room with more quiet or glossy eyes, if someone can say "this evening I needed it", then the music service turned out. Not because he erased the pain, but because he gave him a form. Not because he solved life, but because for a little while he made it habitable.

    In the end, perhaps, the true center of this experience is right here: in listening as an act of humanity. Piovano tells of two girls, an Israeli and an Iranian, sitting close in his row, and imagines that that image should turn the world, because in music certain differences, for a moment, cease to be boundaries. It's not naive. Music does not stop wars, does not erase history, does not absolve man from his faults. But it shows a chance. And sometimes, in the night of the world, a possibility is already a light.

    So, thinking about Glass and Beethoven, Scolastra and Filarmonica Marchigiana, the voice of Piovano and that word — Time — that continued to come back as an obstinate theme, it seemed to me that the concert had fulfilled its most discreet miracle: not to amaze, but to deepen. There are music that passes and music that remain; but the most necessary do not simply remain in memory. They stay the way we look after the world. For for an hour, perhaps for a little more, time was not the enemy that consumes us, nor the river that takes us away. It was a house. And inside that house, fragile and bright, we found something we believed lost: the possibility of listening, and therefore of being alive with more truth.

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  • Where the timor unfolds and the alma, the memor of its end, is left to the quiet. Among the secret harmonies of the Requiem of Faurè

    Where the timor unfolds and the alma, the memor of its end, is left to the quiet. Among the secret harmonies of the Requiem of Faurè

    A recollection of the soul between sound and silence, where fear unfolds and death is revealed in its composed truth.

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    Ancona 15 April 2026

    I remember almost embarrassing clarity — as it happens for those moments who do not ask to be remembered and just for this they do not forget — the evening in which, without any particular disposition, I found myself listening to the Requiem of Fauré. There was neither in me nor the fervour of the scholar, nor the devoted expectation of those who approach a sacred work with the intention of being built of it; indeed, if I must be honest, I carried with me that elegant distraction and a little guilty of those who believe they can cross the beauty without being touched.

    And yet, few jokes were enough — few, but of such a unique quality to escape any frantic description — because my safety, so well-disposed and so unfounded, was intrigued with a discretion that, if it had not been so deep, could have exchanged for kindness.

    There is nothing that would be expected of a Requiem. No harsh gravity, no sense of imminent catastrophe, none of those solemnities that, more than rising, sometimes seem to please their own weight. But there was a sort of measure — and give me the term, though imperfect — that did not humiliate the pain, but did not even exhibit it; a composure that did not deny death, but it deprived it of all theatricality.

    It was then that I understood, not without some inner resistance, that Gabriel Fauré did not intend to persuade me of anything. He did not want to teach, nor to move in the most immediate sense of the term; and his renunciation — so unusual, so little accommodating — It produced a more radical effect than any statement: it left me alone, but not abandoned; exposed, but not threatened.

    It is as unique as, in the history of music, the most daring works are recognized not so much for what they say, as for what they dare omit. In the case of the Requiem of Fauré, this omission assumes an almost philosophical character: he renounces terror. There where others — and just evoke the names of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Giuseppe Verdi — they had questioned death through tremor or challenge, Fauré chooses a way that, at first sight, may appear less intense, but that, at a more careful glance, it turns out to be an almost disconcerting audacity: he removes his apparatus from death.

    And what remains, when the end of his most feared images is deprived?

    It remains, to say it with a frankness that does not exclude grace, the simple fact of not being able to continue. A limit, and nothing more.

    Now, if there is something that the human soul endures with difficulty, it is not so much the presence of evil, as the absence of a form that makes it intelligible. Judgment, punishment, even punishment — all these figures, however terrible, have the advantage of offering a narrative. But Fauré, with a discretion that shatters irony, withdraws this narrative, and leaves the listener in front of a more naked truth, and therefore more demanding: that of an existence that does not need to be justified or punished, but only understood in its end.

    This understanding, however, does not give itself as a concept, but as an experience — and, as far as I am concerned, it was revealed with unexpected clarity in the "Sanctus".

    There is, at that time, an appearance that escapes any ordinary description. The harp — and here every word risks being either too poor or too stressed — does not accompany, does not say: inaugurates. Its sound stretches out with a naturalness that makes it forget its origin, as if it were not produced, but simply given.

    Then I had the singular impression — that I could not defend with arguments, but that I cannot deny — to find me suspended. Not raised, not elevated in the rhetorical sense of the term, but freed from the very weight of being placed. It was like planar, yes, but without wind, without direction: above an infinite sea, immovable, whose extension did not arouse dizziness, but an unexpected quiet.

    The ropes of the harp drew, so to speak, the surface of this sea; and when the choir entered, he did not do it to dominate it, but to live it. The voices rested on that sound as light on water, without ripple. There was nothing solemn in the common sense: no affirmation, no will to rise. And yet, precisely in this renunciation, something was manifested higher than any elevation: a presence that did not ask to be recognized, because it could not be denied.

    If the "Sanctus" was, so to speak, a revelation of space, the "Pie Jesu" was a revelation of the limit.

    Here the music is portrayed again, as a person of great education who, having said the essential, does not insist. The single voice arises, and its simplicity is such as to disarm every attempt of interpretation. There is no supplication in the dramatic sense of the term; there is no urgency, nor fear. There is, rather, a form of abandonment that has nothing passive, but that comes from such a complete understanding that you no longer need to resist.

    I remember having felt, at that moment, a feeling that I could describe — with some fear of being misunderstood — like a loss. Not loss of something dear, but loss of a tension. As if a part of me, always vigilant and always ready to oppose, had suddenly been found without function.

    And it was then that death, a word that until then I had dealt with that prudence that is proper to things not understood, ceased to appear to me as a violent interruption. She became a friend — would be an expression too easy — but stopped being enemy.

    In this transformation of the gaze, which happens without declaring itself, is perhaps the highest lesson of the Requiem of Fauré. There is no consolation, because consolation implies a promise; and Fauré, with a coherence that shatters the severity, refuses to promise. There is not even despair, because despair requires conflict, and here the conflict has already been overcome.

    There is, however, a sort of balance — fragile, of course, and yet sufficient — that comes from the renunciation of images that, while making death more bearable, make it even less true.

    When, finally, the "In Paradisum" unfolds, it is not the impression of reaching a conclusion, but of witnessing a progressive subtraction. The voices are made to read, the harmonics are rarefied, as if the sound itself, reached the limit of its need, retreated with an almost moral discretion.

    There is no triumph, there is no landing. There is, rather, the lack of that need — so deeply human — to reach.

    And perhaps, if I am given a conclusive thought, it is precisely here that the work reaches its highest truth: in suggesting, without ever affirming it, that the end is not an event to understand, but a condition to welcome; and that such acceptance, far from being a surrender, can constitute — for short and precarious — a form of peace.

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