ALTA FEDELTÀ DIGITALE, Year 43rd
(Edisport Editoriale S.p.A. -Milano)
November 2000 (page 176):
At the editorial office with... Sergio Calligaris,
by Giulio Cancelliere

Tradition and originality
Pianist and composer of world-wide reputation, Sergio Calligaris came and met us at AF Theater to tell us about the reasons alienating him from composition in '50s and the one of his recent return. According to his point of view, he talked about the contemporary music panorama.

In the wide and in some ways bleak territory of contemporary classical music, where it isn't easy to bump into serene and soothing personalities, where it's especially usual meeting solitary fellows wandering and looking for audience disposed to listen to, Sergio Calligaris' figure, pianist and composer, represents a sort of bright exception. Argentinian of birth but of evident Italian origins, he has chosen since many years our Country as homeland of adoption, although he lived for many years in the United States. Concert performer since his earliest childhood, he has dedicated to piano a big part of his lifetime, so that in Fifties this instrument represented for him a sort of way out.

"It was a protest for me against the so called prevailing avant-garde. At a certain point I didn't recognize me any more in the role of composer, because the composer was becoming something I didn't understand, but above all I didn't share. And what's the worst, all this represented the main trend. At that point I refused to go on composing and I devoted myself to concert perfoming activity. I didn't lack technical qualifications and I had the possibility to show off all over the world".

AF: What was, and maybe still is, lacking to contemporary composition?

Calligaris: "Someone says that my main references have to be found in late Romanticism, and they're right. It's evident that a musician like Rachmaninov, in his guise of pianist and composer, a role actually rare nowadays, is stylistically similar to me, but I'd go even more back until Bach and his lesson of counterpoint, to go up to Hindemith and Berg passing through Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Händel and Bellini. My favourite composer is always Schumann".

AF: But what happened to make you disgusted by composing?

Calligaris: "A paradoxical situation was made: I felt a sort of shame around me towards beautiful, melodic, singing things. It was disappeared the pleasure to give oneself up to pleasant sensation induced by a romantic, sentimental theme. So: there was the shame of feeling. And I couldn't accept that".

AF: Has the situation changed today?

Calligaris: "Not really. Just listen to the radio: Romanticism has been suppressed. They go from Monteverdi and Gesualdo da Venosa, with all respect for such great composers, to contemporary music. But why cannot one listen to a Brahms' Intermezzo or a Chopin's Nocturne? Why this discrimination?"

AF: Maybe a bit of provincialism?

Calligaris: "That's very probable. We've got a point in which we appreciate some fourteenth-century remote author more than Schubert. Certain intellectual use polished languages to wrap mediocre compositions in artistic value, that no one feels like listening to".

AF: What did make you going back to compose?

Calligaris: "A question of affection towards a fraternal friend of mine, for whom I wrote Il Quaderno Pianistico di Renzo (Renzo's Piano Notebook) in 1978. I felt the requirement to express directly in person and no more just through other people's works. Since then I've never stopped."

Today Sergio Calligaris' compositions are published and performed all over the world and his discography consists of recordings of classical and contemporary music, from Chopin to Rachmaninov, from Schumann to Ravel, although the most solid part concerns his own original works like the already cited Renzo's Piano Notebook, the Three Madrigals, the Symphonic Dances and the Piano Concerto op.29, among the most celebrated. It has been lately published a CD addressed more to "authorized personnel" than normal audience, a sort of sampler of his compositions. A normal event in pop music, but unusual in the classical one.

Calligaris: "It's a CD in which I inserted fragments from some of my compositions as the Double Concerto for violin, piano and string orchestra, the Symphonic Dances, the Two Concert Dances and many others, addressed to advertising agents and film-makers".

AF: What for?

Calligaris: "Many people told me that my music has a strong evocative power, it's very describing. So, why not using it for this purpose? I give you an example: in the TV advertisment of a snack they use, without modifications, the Sicilienne, a theme from Gabriel Fauré's Pelléas et Mélisande. I believe that they might use music by a contemporary author just if they know him. The same thing is valid for film-making: they use music by great composers as Barber or Prokovev, when there are living authors just waiting for proposing their own creations. Not because music by these genius of the past isn't good, but only because it has been used too many times. Luckily, I have publishers at Carisch who believe in my work and wish to make it know to audience as widest as possible, also outside concert halls. Or even doing in a way that who never visited a concert hall would go to."

Giulio Cancelliere