05/10/2015

h.21 Auditorium San Fedele

Francesco Zago
Chaconne Perspective

Music by J.S. Bach e Mattia Clera

Acousmatic interpretation: Giovanni Cospito
Electric guitar: Francesco Zago

In collaboration with Festival Milano Musica and Goethe-Insitut Mailand

Chaconne Perspective takes up the central work of the first part, Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor, originally written for violin. Guitarist Francesco Zago writes about his performance which includes the creation of a piece by Mattia Clera: Bach’s Chaconne is a triumph of the limit and its overcoming: an infinite refraction starting from a minimal material and, moreover, entrusted to a solo instrument. A perfect example of an “eternal brilliant garland”, the Chaconne is an exercise in extreme compositional discipline, due to the constraints imposed by the shape with respect to the proportions of the result. As often happens in Bach, the numerical, even algorithmic and “automatic” structure of his music does not exclude, rather it generates an extreme tension in the “affects”, which apparently resolves itself in the calm central parenthesis of the major mode: an illusion that makes the return to the minor is even more dramatic and lacerating. “Projecting it”, “amplifying it” – expanding it horizontally and vertically, melodic and harmonic – by exploiting the electrical instrumentation and the spatialization of the acusmomium, means stopping it in time and at the same time observing, as through a sound microscope, every single development: in a organism governed by iron laws, each cell proliferates and lives a life of its own, but always alluding to a single beating and immutable heart.