From Casella to Liszt, from the new page of Marco Taralli to the Trittico botticelliano: at the Teatro Manzoni an evening built around the memory, with Michele Campanella and the direction of Davide Trolton
by Marialuisa Veneziano
13 October 2026
Bologna has with the past a familiarity that other cities, perhaps more prudent, would call suffering. It keeps it in the arcades, hides it behind a wall, leaves it sharpened by a facade; and when it seems to have put it duly safe in history, that reappears, with a certain stubbornness, to ask to be again interpreted.
Wednesday, October 7 also happened in music.
At the Teatro Auditorium Manzoni, the Festival Respighi Bologna has interwoven with another significant event, the forty years of Music Together, entrusting to the Soloists Aquilani, at the piano Michele Campanella and the direction of Davide Trolton a programme which, distractedly observed, could have appeared very heterogeneous: Alfredo Casella, Franz Liszt, Marco Taralli, Ottorino Respighi.
But music, when a program is thought well, loves to forget appearances.
The wire existed.
And it was Time.
Not the one measured by the metronome, but the most mysterious one through which a composer looks back and decides that the past is not yet finished.
Casella seeks ancient forms while around him history falls into war. Liszt, on the contrary, writes a page so disturbing that it seems projected forward. Taralli already declares his dialogue with the ancient. Respighi, finally, performs the operation perhaps more dizzying: he looks at three paintings of the fifteenth century and asks the music to get them back to move.
The concert became so, almost without declaring it, a reflection on an essential question:
What does it mean to be modern when you own a memory?
Casella: build while the world breaks
The Concerto for strings, piano and percussion op. 69 by Alfredo Casella takes a date that prevents him from listening innocently.
1943.
Casella writes in Rome between October and November, during the German occupation, while the disease that would lead him to death a few years later has already begun to manifest itself. The composition, intended for Paul Sacher and his orchestra in Basel, was born, therefore, while two instability — that of history and the body — knock at the door of the author.
Yet Casella does not respond with a disgraced music.
It's almost the opposite.
It builds.
Counterpoint, shape, dance, symmetry.
As if, while the world lost its coordinates, music could at least continue to draw straight lines.
TheAllegro quite heavy Initially he has a dense counterpoint writing, in which the piano does not behave according to the romantic model of the sovereign soloist surrounded by orchestral subjects. Instead it enters the mechanism, it opposes you and together it belongs to you.
It's a substantial difference.
The piano is not simply front to the bows.
IS inside the structure.
Michele Campanella was therefore confronted with a page in which virtuosity cannot become external performance: rhythmic precision, articulation, ability to emerge and immediately after returning to the fabric.
And the presence of Campanella, historical figure of the Italian piano school, gave this repertoire a particular weight: not the piano as an athletic exercise, but as an intelligence of form. Music Together presented it, not wrongly, as a true institution of the Neapolitan piano school, on the eve of the double finish of the eighty years and sixty years of career.
Then comes the Saraband.
And here time changes.
The ancient dance, already present in the coeva Sonata for harp op. 68 and transported by Casella in the Concert, is not archaeology. There is no eighteenth-century postcard.
The storm becomes rather memory of an order.
Serious step, scanning, collecting.
A form of the past called to speak within one of the most disordered eras of European history.
It is difficult not to feel something profoundly human: when everything goes, looking for a form does not necessarily mean fleeing from the present.
It can mean resist him.
Even the final starts with energy, almost with stubborn confidence in the movement, before reaching a more obscure conclusion, sustained by a serious design of the low instruments that the sources of the time even read as a funeral present.
It is not necessary to force the biography to understand its weight.
Just listen to the idea.
A music that wants to proceed.
And something, below, that begins to hold it.
Liszt: the piano before becoming emperor
Then Malédiction.
And the title, one must recognize it, does not promise precisely a evening of serena holiday.
Liszt wrote this unique page for piano and strings in the 1930s; he remained unpublished during his life and saw publication only in 1915. The sources even pose an interesting problem on his own identity: concert for piano and strings or more intimate chamber work with piano strongly concert?
It is this ambiguity that makes it fascinating.
The young Liszt is not yet the monument of himself.
It is not yet entirely the prometeic pianist that the century would learn to worship and, sometimes, to fear.
He's looking.
The writing is unstable, nervous, travelled by harmonic tensions that seem to want to continually subtract the ground under the listener’s feet.
And so, after Casella, the piano suddenly changes nature.
In the first it was part of a constructive organism.
In Liszt becomes a perturbing force.
Here modernity does not seek ancient architecture in which to find shelter.
It seems to want to burn it from the inside.
The settlement was therefore much less arbitrary than it could appear: Casella and Liszt both question the relationship between individual and sound collectivity.
Where does the soloist end?
Where does the ensemble begin?
When the piano leads, and when it is absorbed?
Technical questions, certainly.
But the great concerting forms are always, in the end, even small social metaphors.
There is an individual.
There is a community.
And you have to find a way to make them speak without one destroying the other.
Marco Taralli: the ancient after the ancient has already happened
The Small Suite in Ancient Style by Marco Taralli carried the program directly into the present.
The composition was very fresh: the first absolute execution had happened the day before the Eagle, always with the Solisti Aquilani, Trolton and Campanella; Bologna immediately collected the following.
But the title already poses an interesting aesthetic problem.
What does it mean, in 2026, to write "in ancient style"?
We can no longer do that gesture with the same innocence with which it would be done two centuries ago.
Between us and the ancient have passed Stravinsky, Casella, Respighi, neoclassicism, postmodernity, philology, historically informed practice.
The ancient, today, is never only ancient.
IS the memory we possess of the ancient.
Taralli then enters a delicate territory: to use a recognizable grammar without turning it into disguise, to make the memory speak without reducing it to nostalgia.
And that is precisely why his presence in the program made sense.
Casella had recovered the raft.
Respighi would have gradually summoned the Botticellian Renaissance.
Taralli was among these two worlds remembering that the relationship of Italian music with its history has never been peaceful.
We Italians have a wonderful and terrible problem: we have so much past that we risk continually being owners instead of interlocutors.
The best music avoids both extremes.
It does not destroy what came before to prove modern.
But he doesn't even polish it until he turns it into an overcoat.
He interrogates him.
Replies: When Botticelli starts moving
Then comes the Trittico botticelliano.
And all that until then had been a speech about memory suddenly becomes color.
Respighi composes it in 1927 for an organic surprisingly content: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, triangle, bells, celesta, harp, piano and strings. A chamber palette, therefore, far from the orchestral mass of the great Roman pages.
It's a decisive choice.
Botticelli doesn't need marble.
It needs transparency.
Respighi does not want to paint over The paintings. He wants to find their temporal equivalent.
Because here lies the deep difficulty of music inspired by painting.
A painting exists at the same time.
Music is not.
The Spring by Botticelli is already entirely in front of us at the moment when we look at her: Mercury, thanks, Venus, Flora, Zefiro.
Respighi must force us to meet her. in time.
You have to decide which color will come first.
What figure should emerge.
What movement should we imagine?
In other words, he must perform a small miracle:
to walk what Botticelli had stopped.
Spring: do not describe the flowers, but let them be born
In Spring trilli, tremoli, mobile figurations and reminiscences of ancient dances produce a light writing, continually crossed by small inner motions.
But speaking only of "descripttivism" would be reductive.
Respighi is not composing a sound catalog of flowers, trees and nymphs.
He's translating the quality of the Boticellian movement.
Let's look at the Three Graces.
The bodies seem to move and however possess the immovable perfection of the image.
Music must do exactly this contradiction: advance without losing grace, dance without becoming heavy.
And this is where a complex like The Solisti Aquilani finds a particularly congenial repertoire to its nature.
The score demands chamber precision before even power.
I listen to each other.
Elasticity.
Ability to pass the color from one tool to another without the phrase losing continuity.
The merit of the ensemble lies in recalling how Respighi can be refined when freed from the equivocal according to which it would be only the composer of the great orchestral explosions.
The Respighi of Threesome Don't raise your voice.
He paints with the tip of the brush.
The Adoration of the Magi: when the Renaissance recalls the Middle Ages
The second picture completely changes the light.
In theAdoration of the Magi a pastoral writing appears; flute and bassoon also introduce the melody of Come, come Emmanuel, while the instrumentation uses colors that suggest the approach of the caravan and a more dreamed than geographical East.
And here's a magnificent short circuit.
We listen to a composer of the twentieth century.
Look at a painter from the fifteenth century.
That represents an evangelical scene.
Using a melody from an even older tradition.
How many times do they exist at the same time in these few jokes?
This is the reason why simply talking about "ancient music" and "modern music" sometimes serves nothing.
In musical memory, time does not go straight.
It folds.
Come back.
He survives.
A medieval fragment can enter the twentieth century and, without cease to belong to its past, become a new matter.
Respighi understood this possibility with extraordinary intelligence.
He did not embalm the ancient.
He made it ring in the present.
Venus: the sea before the goddess
Finally, The Birth of Venus.
And Respighi makes here perhaps the most poetic choice of the entire triptych.
Before the goddess, she gives us the sea.
The arches build a wavering movement; trilli, arpeggi and light timbre oscillations transform the orchestral surface into water. Only progressively emerges a wider reason, tied to the figure of Venus and built through arcaizzanti modal references.
It's an important detail.
Respighi does not translate the picture saying: "This is Venus".
He leads us to her.
Music becomes waiting for the look.
First we hear water.
Then the wind.
Then something gets up.
And it is precisely on this page that the small orchestra shows how much color does not depend on the number of instruments, but on the quality of their relationships.
Celesta, harp, piano, breaths and strings do not simply produce a beautiful sound.
Building depth.
Respighi orchestra as a painter who knows the value of space between two colors.
Transparency is not the absence of matter.
It is perfectly distributed matter.
And here the Solisti Aquilani deserve special recognition: a compagine born on the culture of the ensemble naturally possesses that attention to the inner line that the Threesome requires. One of the chronicles following the evening, although very strict on other aspects of the performance, explicitly recognized the quality of the ensemble.
Davide Trolton was in front of a task far from elementary. A similar program does not require a single directional gesture, but four different ideas of weight, time and articulation: Casella geometry cannot breathe as Liszt; Taralli archaism cannot be treated as the colorism of Respighi. The value of the wand here is measured first of all in the ability not to uniform.
And entrusting a program so exposed to a young director also means remembering that tradition is not only preserved by entrusting it to those who have known it for decades.
Store giving it to someone who will still have to take it elsewhere.
An Italian evening, but not provincial
In the end, the most interesting data of the Bologna concert was not the presence of four very different composers.
It was what happened by putting them next to each other.
Liszt looked ahead.
Casella looked back to keep moving.
Taralli asked the old man if he still had something to say.
Respighi took Botticelli by hand and led it in the twentieth century.
None of them considered the past a place in which to return to dwell.
They considered him an interlocutor.
And this is perhaps one of the central issues of Italian music.
We inherited such a vast heritage that we could spend entire seasons celebrating it.
But celebrating is not enough.
The task of interpretation is another.
It is necessary to allow a written page to happen again.
Don't reproduce it.
Let her take a chance.
This is where the work of an orchestra becomes really cultural: not when it properly performs the past, but when it manages to subtract it from the condition of the past.
The Solisti Aquilani, led by an excellent and sensitive Davide Trolton, have led to Bologna this identity: that of an ensemble in which the Cameroon discipline remains the foundation even when the repertoire assumes orchestral dimension. Campanella gave the evening the weight of a long interpretative history; Trolton that of a generation that that story must receive without being crushed.
And in the end it was Respighi.
Or maybe Botticelli.
It is not easy to determine where one ends and the other begins.
The Spring He kept dancing.
I Magi continued their journey.
Venus still climbed from the water.
Only for one night they no longer needed to be looked at.
They found another way to exist.
They became sound.
And this is perhaps the most serious prodigy of music when it encounters a work of art: don’t illustrate it, don’t explain it, do not overlap her with a sound caption.
Give her the time that painting had taken her away.
Botticelli had stopped a moment.
Respighi put him back in motion.
And to Manzoni, almost a century later, that movement still had someone willing to continue it.
Photo Credit: Paolo Perna
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