For the opening of Inner_Spaces Fall 2023 on Monday, Sept. 25, the San Fedele Cultural Foundation presents a double program of instrumental music and synthesizers, with a dense interaction of live electronics. A beginning that exemplarily illustrates the Autunnale theme “memory and creative continuity,” with the exceptional presence of musician Francesco Tristano. A fifty-minute solo at the legendary Yamaha CFX Grand Coda and synthesizers entitled On Early Music, with at its center some pieces from the great keyboard season of the Italian and English seventeenth century (Frescobaldi, Gibbons, Bull), but also original pieces by the Luxembourgish pianist inspired by ancient stylistic features or with improvised phrasing, and finally rehashes and reworkings of the musical material with the use of complex electronic sonification (processing, effects, spatialization algorithms, delays, saturated and disharmonic reverbs).

Tristano, with his unique art, which integrates piano interpretation of the great repertoire with languages borrowed from club music, succeeds in creating sound performances by bridging present and past, in which the ancient retains its mystery and the contemporary draws inspiration from it, and conversely the contemporary resonates the ancient in a new perspective. It is an engaging but also pictorial musical experience of coloring sounds, with tones that are sometimes harmonious and austere, sometimes soft and muted, or flamboyant and crackling in an attempt to revive the rhythmic structure of ancient dance steps.

In the first part of the evening, the Syntax Ensemble, composed of eight musicians and resident at San Fedele, brings to the stage an original continuum between collage and DJ set, in which instrumental works of two generations are compared, on the one hand, the minimalism of David Lang (1957) with the most inventive representative of twentieth-century Italian Luciano Berio (1925-2003), and on the other, the search for a sound realized on the fringes of traditional instrument technique by Austrian Beat Furrer (1954) with the lyrical and intense imagination of Russian Gubajdulina (1931). The whole is cemented by an electronic setting by Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) consisting of excerpts from the pieces “Concret PH,” “La Légende d’Eer,” and “Diamorphoses.” At the center of the sequence, like an interlocking gemstone, is Xenakis’s “Rebonds B” for percussion, an immense abstract ritual in which the one performer gives rise to a dense rhythmic counterpoint of bouncing and jerking, creating the illusion of a multiplicity of performers.