Slavia Festival 1995, illustrative notes to the programme, Bologna, Accademia Filarmonica, 24 pp.

Review: Piano Time, gennaio 1996, pp.43-44 (Caterina Criscione).

On 11 November, at the Sala Mozart of the Accademia Filarmonica, there will start the Slavia Festival 1995 with an event dedicated to the Russian Composer Aleksandr Skrjabin and his family. On this occasion, the composer’s daughter Marina – today eighty-five years old – sent some reproductions of his “collages” and a greeting message for the audience. During the first part of the concert, pianist Sabrina Avantario will perform some early compositions by Skrjabin, followed by some preludes by his son Julian when he was only ten. Considering their brevity and economy of the harmonic and melodic figurations, Julian’s preludes follow Aleksandr Skrjabin’s last compositions. Julian imagined complex harmonies and was not used to the world of the major and minor modes. Even in their brevity and formal simplicity, these short works permit to grasp the originality of Julian Skrjabin’s musical approach, by which he would certainly have gone far if, owing to an unfortunate accident, he had not been drowned in the river Dnepr in the summer 1919 when he was only eleven. After the performance of “Homage to Skrjabin” by young composer Andrea Musizza and of the Fourth Sonata by Czech composer Lubos Fiser (upon the theme of Skrjabin’s Tenth Sonata), there will be  the listening of a short composition by Skrjabin, “Désir”, immediately followed by its “invertd” version (that is where all intervals have been reversed), elaborated by Luigi Verdi.
As one knows, around 1907 Skrjabin had been influenced by the theosophic “theory of correspondences”, according to which “everything at the bottom is similar to everything at the top and viceversa”. Infact Skrjabin composed “Désir” so that all intervals can be overturned  while the composition does not lack  its expressive autonomy and musical coherence. The concert will end with the performance of some of Skrjabin’s most famous works. During the event, the winner of the Competition in Musical Analysis “N.Slonimskij”  on the topic “The Piano Sonata in Russia and Ukraina” – organized by the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna with the A.Gi.Mus and the Italy-Russia Association – will be proclaimed. The prestigious judging committee ranges Loris Azzaroni, Mario Baroni, Marco De Natale, Piero Rattalino and Paolo Troncon. The Slavia Festival will continue with a series of interesting concerts, always at the Accademia Filarmonica: on 25 November Francesca Campagnaro and Laura Di Cera will perform some 4-hand-piano  transcriptions by Vasil’enko, Ljadov and Rimskij Korsakov; on 30 November pianist Dario Marrini will perform an original programme dedicated to Ukrainian composers Ljatošinskij and Sillinger, whose 100th birth-anniversary falls this year for both. On 9 December, the concert will be dedicated to the Russian chamber vocal lyrical music, and in  the end, on 16 December at the Oratorio San Rocco there will be a Piano Marathon, at the conclusion of which some pages by Fjodor Akimenko - a very original exponent of the Russian Impressionism, whose 50th-death anniversary falls this year – will be performed. Most compositions are performed for the first time in Italy during the Slavia Festival.

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