Intervista su Brescia Musica Ricostruendo Mendelssohn a colloquio con Orazio Sciortino a cura di Paolo Bolpagni

Interevista per TgCom on line

Intervista su «Il Pungolo» notiziario della Società dei Concerti

Articolo sul «Giornale di Sicilia» del 12 Gennaio 2010

La Sicilia - 8 Gennaio 2010

Intervista sul Giornale della Musica - Gennaio 2010

Recensione di Quirino Principe sul Sole 24 Ore del 29 novembre 2009

22 06 2009 Wolfsburger Nachrichten traduzione in inglese

22 06 2009 Wolfsburger Nachrichten

Review on the magazine "Amadeus" - February 2009 - by Cesare Fertonani

Review on the magazine "Suonare News" - December 2008 - by Antonio Galanti

Review on the daliy "Gazzetta di Parma" - November 2008 - by Vincenzo Segreto

Review on the web by Marco Dal Vaglio - October 2008
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from Interview on the italian magazine “IL GIORNALE DELLA MUSICA”

-Which kind of music have you started to write? When have you started?
Choral music, at the conservatory. I have sang in a choir; I first met Palestrina and Di Lasso and then Chopin. This experience had a great influence on my career. From the professional point of view, the composer and the pianist are two different figures, but I’ve never separated them in my mind. The pianist mustn’t never give up the idea of forging the material he deals with.
-Is the figure of the pianist too narrow for you?
Today, the figure of the pianist has lost its intellectual aspect: pianists don’t compose any more, howewer this has been happening since a long time. Since forty years, pianists have been remembering the splendours of the previous generation, as the pianists of the previous generation had already done. What is different is that Rubinstein, Richter and all the others from that generation lived remembering Liszt, Saint-Saens and so on. What is more, the piano competitions’ mechanism keeps the pianist caged in a repertoire limits his creativity, even if it’s good to win a competition.
from Interview on the italian magazine TGCOM-ON LINE

-When have you understood that piano would be one of the most important parts of your life?
When I’ve understood that music would be for me an essential means to find beauty. The most important aim of my professional activity is communicating to others an authentic musical thought, which should be based on aural likeness and, at the same time, lead people to think about present times.
- Tell us about your research work on “degenerate music” that you are carrying on with musicologist Gottfried Wagner.
It is a very passionating work aimed at showing in a new light some musical figures who were persecuted by the nazi and fascist regimes for aesthetical or religious (because they were Jews) reasons. This aim concerns both music and history; in fact, the meaning of this work is to reflect, and make people reflect, on the effects that deportation and cultural censorship (widely speaking) can have on present and future generations.
-What’s the reaction of your audience at the end of your concerts?
During a concert, I always try to establish a symbiotic relationship with my audience, a sort of “transference”, as psychologists would say. That creates the empathy which is necessary to the communication of a musical thought.
SUPEREVA ONLINE MAGAZINE
The sicilian pianist made a splendid execution, combining a pure sound with a huge passionateness. He thus showed the maturity that only great pianists have.
From the preface of “CADENZE PER I CONCERTI PER PIANOFORTE E ORCHESTRA DI MOZART” (Ricordi-Universal 2007), by Riccardo Risaliti
It is a work of high artistic value and perfect stylistic adherence. It offers extremely solid solutions for all the Mozart’s concertos lacking of their original cadence. Let’s hope that this work will meet the success it deserves and that our musical sensibility will meet more and more rarely the horrific mistakes still performed in the concert halls.
from an Interview on the italian magazine Brescia Musica “NEL BICENTENARIO DELLA NASCITA DI FELIX MENDELSSOHN-BATHOLDY. A COLLOQUIO CON ORAZIO SCIORTINO” (celebrating the bicentenary of Felix Mendelssohn-Batholdy’s birth. An interview with Orazio Sciortino) by Paolo Belpagni

How has this work of integration begun?
It was Roberto Prosseda, a great musician (I appreciate him very much for his work about Mendelssohn), who revealed to me the existence of those fragments, while testing my interest about a work of stylistic rebuilding. I was immediately sent the copies of the manuscripts; they are unpublished and signed by the author, and are kept in many european libraries. I thus begun this work, with a certain degree of reverential fear; it was fascinating and risky at the same time.
You are a young composer. Why have you decided to begin such a work, instead of dedicating all your time to the creation of original works?
Because I think that a composer from the 21st century represents the historical continuity between the past and the contemporary period. Furthermore, music history shows us that the languages used by musicians are not a new creation, but rather a trasformation. As an exemple, while rediscovering Bach, Mendelssohn found himself and offered us an extraordinary, revolutionary (more than believed) message. In fact, he has shown us that a piece of art lives for ever when it has a relationship with history. The work of art shouldn’t erase history, but rather absorb it and give it back to the world through the contemporary sensibility. As I’m in search of a personal language, this process is essential in this part of my life. But maybe it is essential for the time we live too. What is more, the practice of stylistic composition shouldn’t be considered a pure exercise, as it often happens in the conservatories, but rather a deep experience. It can be very useful to make a musician think about his artistic choices; even if that thinking can’t make one a musical genius, it can make him a good “craftman” for sure (this is a rare quality today, which I believe to be a goal to achieve and a starting point at the same time). In my case, howewer, my relationship with Mendelssohn, and with Mozart before him, isn’t just an academic exercise. Actually, even if I work on the language used by another man, I use the thinking and the behaviour of a different period. This subject is very complicated and can’t be explicated in a few lines.
While completing Mendelssohn’s fragments have you tried to work as you thought the autor himself would have done?
When working with uncompleted works by a great composer as Medelssohn was, the contemporary composer has two choices; he can either transform and interpret those fragments according to his stylistic preferences, or try to assimilate and “metabolise” the formal behaviour of the author, aiming at the creation of a final elaboration which should be plausible and faithful to the intrinsic structure and to the “aims” of the uncompleted work. Luciano Berio has given us a great teaching. With his completing works, he has shown us that it is possible to adapt to contemporay times a language which appeared to be old, without emulating the work of a philologist (Berio wasn’t a philologist, nor I am). Anyway, my work is more oriented towards the latter choice. It is always difficult and fascinating at the same time to compose in a style which isn’t yours. To sum up, you can’t avoid contemporary style, even if you write as a musician of the past would have done and you use his material as a starting point.
Now, I would like you to talk about Mendelssohn, as the celebration his birth’s bicentenary offers the opportunity to make original thoughts about him. In your opinion, what is his place in the music history?
He’s both one of the greatest composers who has ever lived and an intellectual of first class; he was appreciated very much by Schumann and Brahms, but then he was forgotten and belittled. It is worth to remind that Mendelssohn (the nephew of Moses, who was one of the greatest philosophers of the Enlightenment) was a precocious genius. When he was only ten, he became friend with Goethe; while he was a teenager, he already knew many anciente and modern languages and translated some latin plays into German. And don’t forget his fine watercolours. What’s Mendelssohn place in history? It’s difficult to find an answer, if we follow the rigid classification used by musicology. Was he a classical musician living in the wrong century or one of the first Romantics, like Weber? Was he the author of excellent drawing-room music (as Schubert too was often deemed to be) or a symphonist who can be compared with the two “giants”, Beethoven and Brahms? In the Romantic period, so rich in evident inner sufferings, it was difficult to pay attention to a soul who was telling about himself so quietly, using the consoling melody of an angel so sincere, who was above human things. Today, we can say that Mendelssohn is not a “Classical musician who lived in the period of Romanticism”, but the “prince of Romantics”. Robert Schumann already knew that, when he dedicated to him a piece from Album für die Jugend. Curiously enough, during one of his visionary deliriums before his death, Schumann saw Mendelssohn’s spirit, listened to the melody he was singing and wrote it. That melody would become the theme of Geistervariationen, his last composition.