Review and pics from Fluxus cardboards for G.Chiari
A nice evening indeed the one at MAMBo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna on Saturday 26th September. It was a pleasure to be part of the celebration for the centennial of the composer and artist Giuseppe Chiari and I was very happy to visit the beautiful exhibition and listen to the fascinating performance of Metodi by Deborah and Chiara.
Here you can find the complete review of the concert by Paolo Carradori (in Italian) on Le Salon Musical.
Below an extract in English, interpolated by some of the nice pics courtesy of Comune di Bologna | Settore Musei Civici | MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna made by Ornella De Carlo.
Agnese Toniutti draws up a Fluxus Cardboards For Giuseppe Chiari Solo program that involves composers who not only took more or less active part in the movement / non-movement Fluxus (of which the Florentine composer was the only Italian to be part as an official member since 1962) but share with Chiari the same vision of research, experimentation, musical action: Philip Corner, Giancarlo Cardini and Mieko Shiomi.
Intervalli n.2, Do, which is part of a twelve-part piano cycle, is a good entrance ticket to the world of Chiari. Arsonal blocks are suspended, they chase each other, they go as if filling an undefined space, they accumulate creating tensions. […] Toniutti chiselle every element, offers iridescing shapes in a scenario where performance rhythm and gesture complete a deep reading. With Exstensions of Giuseppe Chiari’s “DO” and Giuseppe Chiari’s “DO”further extended Corner plays, elaborates, expands the intervals. Extensions that regenerate new sounds, unexpected routes, sharp corners, bright waterfalls. Corner uses Chiari’s materials, summons them, as a launch pad for new explorations, in a dialogue with both composers stating that the score is never final.
If Chiari is above all known, even by those who frequent the contemporary field, for Gesti sul piano (a long gestation that goes from 1962 to 1976) there will be a good reason. Probably because it is among the first examples of music to see, a direct thread with the poetic of Fluxus. […] An action music that is never the same as itself, plastic, unpredictable. Toniutti, who knows very well that her role, her relationship with the instrument is constantly in question, chooses the path of a draining of the performative aspect in favor of a radical sound research.
The last violent vibration of the gestures still wanders when the scenario opens on Foglie d’autunno lentamente trascolorano. We will be able to define Cardini a pleasant anomaly in the framework of the new music of the second half of the twentieth century. What is it doing in that context of extreme research a composer who claims to love melody unconditionally? In Bologna the answer is given by the Friulian pianist who knows the Tuscan composer well by proposing this short masterpiece. In Foglie d’autunno trascolorano… Cardini shows how the melody, purified of clichés and vices, can tell us through beauty, purity of silence, poetry of the fleeting moment, the restlessness, problems and fragility of contemporary man. In the Cardinian plot the evoked melodic track is always stained, wounded by a restlessness, a doubt, which makes it current, never taken for granted, never cheesy. In the game of friendships, complicity and homage Chiari, between 1997 and 1998, wrote PCA (Per Cardini), two booklets containing eight short piano compositions. Here shines the intimacy of the dialogical exchange, through short, dry phrases. The composer seems to want to approach the poetics of his friend, managing only to touch it.
The Toniutti set closes with Direction music for a pianist by Shiomi. The pianist also becomes a narrator on poetic fragments, reflections on art and life. […] The performance creates a direct relationship with the public through the cardboard as musical objects, the word, the monologue, the piano understood as a congenius capable of generating an action that amplifies the communicative ability of the work.
