Gala Concert for Fazioli@ IIC Paris

mitoDuo Dillon-Torquati recently performed at the Italian Institute of Culture in Paris for a Gala Concert. In fact, Marina Valensise, dynamic and vibrant director of the IIC, decided to provide a new Fazioli grand piano for the Hall and this was the opening event of the funding campaign. Here’s the link for supporting this important initiative!

The Duo proposed a journey in Fairy tales of the Romantic period, presenting important works by Ferruccio Busoni, Robert Schumann and Edvard Grieg. CLICK HERE FOR THE LIVE VIDEO!

Sciarrino @ NDF ’14 Sweden

148863Emanuele Torquati has been invited to take part in NEW DIRECTIONS FESTIVAL 2014, that will take place in Lulea (Sweden) from 22nd till 24th May. The Festival is focused on Salvatore Sciarrino’s music, and the composer himself will be present and will teach during a workshop for young composers. Emanuele will perform on 23rd May with cellist Francesco Dillon, DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES project, featuring a.o. Sciarrino’s Melencolia 1, and on 24th May two Sciarrino’s seminal works, Perduto in una città d’acque (1990-91) and Due Notturni crudeli (2001).

“Perduto” was written straight after Luigi Nono’s death and the “città d’acque” of the title is Venice, where Nono lived his life. The first of 2 Notturni crudeli is based on an ecstatic repetition of very high chords interspersed  with extremely fast notes in other registers, and brings the listener to a timeless dimension; the second, “Furia, metallo”  is a relentless alternance between loud chords and fast figurations.
LISTEN HERE to Melencolia 1 performed by Duo Dillon-Torquati

Artist in Residence @ IIC Paris

Emanuele Torquati was invited as artist in residence at the Italian Institute of Culture in Paris in February. He will work for one month at Hotel de Galliffet, presenting his activities in 2 public performances in the frame of “Les Promesses de l’Art”, a program recently started by IIC Paris for supporting rising talents in different disciplines.

The first concert will take place on 6th February at 8 pm and is part of the “Projet Bloom”, a collective enterprise of artistic excitement. Tunneling underground, building bridges, provoking collisions, it wants to reinvent the conditions of production and the reception of works. The program is built around some Liszt’s Piano Pieces composed in Italy, such as “La lugubre gondola” and “Richard Wagner – Venezia”, and will put these in communication with other works by Romitelli, Sciarrino and Marinetti, performed by “Projet Bloom”. The program will be presented also on 11th February at “J.B. Lully” Conservatory in Puteaux.

The second concert will take place on 18th February at 8 pm and it will be a Duo Recital with flutist Matteo Cesari, winner of Kranichsteiner Musikpreis. The program will feature important works for flute and piano based on “Songs”, such as Schubert Introduction, Theme and Variations on Trockne Blumen, Debussy Chansons de Bilitis, and Toshio Hosokawa’s Lied. More, Torquati will premiere some pieces written for him by Stefano Gervasoni and Cesari will give the French premiere of Matthias Pintscher virtuosic “Beyond – a system of passing”.

“Distant Voices, Still Lives” in Strasbourg and London

distantDuo Dillon-Torquati will perform a new version of DISTANT VOICES STILL LIVES project on 8th December in Strasbourg, at L’Imaginaire Festival, and on 24th February 2014 in London, at the Italian Institute of Culture.

A journey on the thread of memory, a search, a pursuit of  a multitude of fugitive voices: voices that tell a story, voices that sing, absent voices, voices only evoked. It is a musical journey for cello and piano, through romantic Lieder (Schumann transcribed by his friend Grutzmacher, Schubert, Liszt), contemporary Lieder (Pagliarani and Bauckholt), folk and ancient songs (Ghisi), the ghosts  of well-known songs (Stardust in Sciarrino), phrases of celebrated men and of the common man (Chet Baker in Jakob TV, Ablinger) transformed into a game of mirrors and echoes that seeks to transcend the barriers of style and type in order to create a new red thread between sounds which are only apparently distant one from another.

The project has been presented in several Festivals in Italy and in Europe, among others Ny Musik Oslo, DeutscheBank Kunsthalle Berlin and in Teatro Argentino La Plata (Argentina).

Important composers such as Carola Bauckholt, Yannis Kyrikiades, Peter Ablinger and Mario Pagliarani gave their contribution to the project, but also rising talents such as Daniele Ghisi, Andrea Agostini and Josè Manuel Serrano wrote new pieces to be premiered.

Berlin, Festivaletteratura, MITO and Trinity College Dublin

proust1Emanuele Torquati will perform several concerts from end of August on, with different Solo and Chamber music projects. He will continue the collaboration with narrator Luca Scarlini, for two monographic tales on Ciaikovsky, playing a selection from “The Seasons op. 37/bis” and 18 Morceaux op. 72, and a completely new one on Marcel Proust, the latter for prestigious Festivaletteratura Mantova. The debut of this project will also include the performance of rares Reynaldo Hahn’s “Portraits de peintres”, on Proust’s texts, beside a selection of composers quoted in the “Recherche” and loved by the famous French writer. The concerts will take place on 27th August in Bormio and on 7th September in Mantova, with a repeat performance on 9th for Torri dell’Acqua Budrio.

More, on 30th October, Emanuele will give a Lecture-Recital at prestigious Trinity College Dublin, for the recently established Music Composition Centre. This institution is providing a new platform for composers equipped for the emerging music of the 21st century. In this occasion, Torquati will offer an extremely varied New Music program, featuring rising talents such as Samy Moussa and Francesco Filidei, along with important works by Pascal Dusapin, Michel Van der Aa and Jonathan Harvey, recently passed away.

As it regards his Chamber music projects, Emanuele will be first in Berlin, presenting “DISTANT VOICES STILL LIVES” with cellist Francesco Dillon on 3rd September at Deutsche Bank KunstHalle during “SUEDEN – Villa Romana in Berlin”. After that, they will take part in Italy’s biggest Festival, MITO Settembremusica, on 17th September in Turin, playing a Recital with music by Lucia Ronchetti, Sergeri Rachmaninov and Edvard Grieg.

Piano Recitals in NYC, Kiev and Italy

Emanuele Torquati will perform six Piano Recitals from 1st May till 2nd June.

First concert will be on1st May in New York, Italian Academy at Columbia University, and follows the invitation to give a Recital for the E. Lorch Memorial. The program will feature Italian Music from Baroque to Contemporary, beside Beethoven’s Les Adieux.

After this thrilling program, Emanuele will present the cycle VOICES AND PIANO by Austrian composer Peter Ablinger, after successful performances in Argentina, for the Italian most prestigious Festival of New Music with Electronics, AngelicA Bologna on 16th May.

The week after (on 22nd) Emanuele will play for “Verso Traiettorie Festival”, which this year is completely devoted to music for piano solo, in the beautiful venue of Parma’s Casa della Musica.

Other two engagements (23rd and 30th), in Prato and Budrio, will follow before the one on 2nd June for ART ARSENAL Festival in Kiev (Ukraine), which will be the last of a very diverse and varied tour, including music by Michel Van der Aa, Jonathan Harvey, Ivan Fedele and Terry Riley.

Duo Dillon-Torquati – Ravel Unravel Tour

project28Emanuele Torquati with his duo partner, cellist Francesco Dillon, will premiere Lucia Ronchetti new work, RAVEL UNRAVEL, written for the duo and commissioned by several Italian Chamber Music Societies. The piece is a theatrical analysis of the encounter between pianist Paul Wittgenstein and Ravel on the occasion of the private performance in Vienna of what is known as the Left hand Concerto, in the version for 2 pianos on 30th 1932.

The pianist interprets the Left hand Concerto, passing from the orchestral part to the solo piano part as if in a private practice session, with repetitions and pauses, constant obsessive confrontation with the infinity of existing interpretations, exploration of most difficult virtuoso sections. He is the pianist Paul Wittgenstein himself, the amputee who attempts to enrich the spare cadenzas, who criticized Ravel and corrected him. The cellist listens and weaves in and out of pianist’s performance, using a private language, with suggestion of words, howls and monologues. He’s Ravel, at the beginning of his mental illness, the semantic privatist imagined by Wittgenstein, struggling witht the devastion of his mental lucidity and the uniqueness of his compositional quest. From time to time the cellist and the pianist talk to each other, using Ravel and Wittgenstein’s words reinvented by Russian poet Eugene Ostashevsky.

The work, as well as some masterworks from French repertoire such as Debussy Sonata, will be presented at Amici della Musica di Ancona on 11th April, at Accademia Filarmonica Romana on 9th May, at Villa Romana on 14th June, at MITO Settembre Musica on 17th September and in other venues on next concert season.

New Schumann CD out for Brilliantclassics

schumann-2On 1st December a new Schumann CD of Duo Dillon-Torquati has been released by Brilliantclassics.
Combining communicative performances with engaging programming, this release is dedicated to Schumann’s music for cello and piano — works that were written after a period devoted almost exclusively to the piano, and whose aim it was to extend musical knowledge and practice.

Indeed, in surveying some of the composer’s most acclaimed works, such as the Piano Quintet Op.44 and Three Romances Op.94 (originally scored for oboe), the compilation also features the linchpin of Schumann’s work, J.S. Bach. Bach’s contrapuntal influence on the composer was immense, and it is therefore unsurprising that Schumann arranged a number of his works — including the complete solo cello suites. Suite No.3 is the one chosen for this release, and is coupled with the Sarabande from No.5 in C minor, this time arranged by F.W. Grützmacher. One of the 19th century’s most acclaimed cellists, Grützmacher played a major role in widening appreciation of significant works, and the compilation offers five such transcriptions by this highly adept arranger. Teaming up once again to deliver consummate readings of these works are the seasoned Duo Dillon-Torquati, both of whom enjoy busy international careers.
This is the second issue of Schumann transcriptions for cello by the duo Francesco Dillon and Emanuele Torquati, “quasi novelli Florestan ed Eusebio, l’ardente violoncello di Dillon e il sensibile pianoforte di Torquati si muovono ‘da padroni’, con immaginativa sprezzatura sentimentale ed ispirata condotta tecnica nel multiforme universo schumanniano” (GP. Minardi).

Their earlier issue received enthusiastic comment in the international press: “comes across with vibrant conviction” (Musicweb International)

Salvatore Sciarrino Vanitas + Francesco Filidei Portrait

vanitas On next 5th December at 9,15 pm there will be the last concert of music@villaromana concerts series, devoted to 2 of the most genial and original Italian contemporary composers. They belong to different generations, but somehow their work has some points of contact and source of inspiration: the first one is Salvatore Sciarrino (1947), while the second is Francesco Filidei (1973). Emanuele Torquati, together with cellist Francesco Dillon and soprano Valentina Coladonato, will perform Sciarrino’s masterwork “Vanitas” (1981), with the significant subtitle “natura morta in un atto” (still life in one act), a 50 minutes long pieces in 5 parts, which explores a unique world of sounds and echoes between the singers and instrumentalists.
In the second part of the evening violinist Aldo Campagnari (Prometeo String Quartet) will join the Trio and several chamber and solo works by Francesco Filidei, going from istrumental virtuosity (his Piano Toccata) until more performative pieces, with a new work commissioned by Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung.

Argentina Tour

Emanuele Torquati has been invited to open the 18th edition of Ciclos de conciertos de musica contemporanea in Buenos Aires, with monumental Charles Ives’s 4th Symphony. The concert will take place on 28th October at legendary Teatro Colon with Argentinian Philarmonics conducted by Alejo Perez.
On 30th Torquati will give a lecture on Scelsi and Messiaen’s Piano Music at Teatro Argentino for La Plata University, then he will perform in Corrientes at Teatro de Vera Peter Ablinger’s extensive cycle “Voices and Piano” on 2nd November. His last concert in Argentina will be on the 4th November at Museo d’arte Hispanoamericana “Fernandez Blanco”, where he’ll give a solo Recital featuring music by D. Scarlatti, L. Janàcek, O. Messiaen, G. Scelsi and Argentinian composers G. Gandini, M. C. Villanueva and M. Etkin.
ives2