Benedetto Boccuzzi
pianist - composer - improviser - teacher
Discography
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À Claude
works by Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen, George Crumb, Toru Takemitsu, Diana Rotaru and Benedetto Boccuzzi
Release date: February 15th 2021
Label: Digressione Music - DCTT111
Worldwide distribution: MILANO DISCHI srl – NAXOS - BELIEVE
À Claude stems from a profound admiration for Claude Debussy and his legacy, a composer who thanks to his intense aesthetic, formal and timbral research has been a fundamental pillar and turning point for the 20th century's musical production. The programme aims to be a family reunion, an ancestral tree starting with Claude Debussy and branching out into all the subsequent generations: Olivier Messiaen continued Debussy's research, merging it with his personal interest in colour and non-European cultures; the Japanese Toru Takemitsu who pays homage to Olivier Messiaen and his rich harmonies; the American George Crumb, whose work takes the piano towards unheard-of timbres and considers Claude Debussy his greatest teacher; the Romanian Diana Rotaru, who pays tribute to the two great masters with her Debumessquisse and finally Benedetto Boccuzzi attempting to condense this legacy in his short piano piece (quasi) Notturno.
Im Wald
works by Robert Schumann, Jörg Widmann, Benedetto Boccuzzi, Franz Schubert, Wolfgang Rihm and Helmut Lachenmann
Release date: April 15th 2022
Label: Digressione Music - DCTT126
Worldwide distribution: MILANO DISCHI srl – NAXOS - BELIEVE
Just over a year after his debut album, Italian pianist and composer Benedetto Boccuzzi presents Im Wald, his second release for Digressione Music. In this new project Boccuzzi intertwines the music of the Romantics Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert with that of the contemporaries Jörg Widmann, Wolfgang Rihm and Helmut Lachenmann, showing, trough a play of reflections and an intergenerational aesthetic dialogue, a multifaceted and "augmented" reality. In the programme, divided into two parts as if they were two Lieder cycles without a singer, the listener/wanderer, accompanied by the detailed and precious narration offered in the booklet by music historian Benedetta Saglietti, is invited to explore an imaginary enchanted forest where reality is repeatedly torn apart by uncanny fantastic hallucinations. In the first half of the album Robert Schumann's nine Forest Scenes (1849) are punctuated by five of the Eleven Humoresques (2007) by Jörg Widmann. The second half is based on a selection of seven Lieder from Franz Schubert's Fair Maid of the Mill (1824) (in August Horn's essential piano transcription), which are commented on first by Wolfgang Rihm's dreamlike Ländler (1979) and then by Helmut Lachenmann's Five Variations on a theme of Franz Schubert (1956). The transition between these two cycles is provided by Boccuzzi's interlude for solo electronics Im Wald (2022). In this piece, conceived as the soundtrack to an imaginary short film inspired by the fantastic visions evoked by the Romantic writer Ludwig Tieck, the piano is first "timbrically extended" and then "filtered through electronics", revealing a new acoustic space. The programme is multidimensional: the interaction between the real and the fantastic, already present in the poetics of Romantic composers, is "augmented" by the hallucinatory visions of contemporary composers and finally extended further through the electronic acoustic space.