Benedetto Boccuzzi
pianist - composer - improviser - teacher
Discography
SOLO PIANO
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À Claude
works by Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen, George Crumb, Toru Takemitsu, Diana Rotaru and Benedetto Boccuzzi
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Release date: February 15th 2021
Label: Digressione Music - DCTT111
Worldwide distribution: MILANO DISCHI srl – NAXOS - BELIEVE
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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
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Release date: April 15th 2022
Label: Digressione Music - DCTT126
Worldwide distribution: MILANO DISCHI srl – NAXOS - BELIEVE
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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.
chamber music
György Kurtág: Blumen die Menschen, nur Blumen
works for solo flute and chamber music by György Kurtág
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Release date: October 10th 2022
Label: Stradivarius STR37228
Worldwide distribution: MILANO DISCHI srl – NAXOS
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Alessandra Rombolà, flute
Benedetto Boccuzzi, piano
Hakon Thelin, double bass
Paolo Leonardi, voice
DIGITAL Release
Benedetto Boccuzzi - Otto Lamenti for solo violin
Release date: March 4th 2022
Label: Digressione Music
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Paride Losacco, violin
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The recording marks the first act of the artistic collaboration between the pianist and composer Benedetto Boccuzzi (1990), already present in the DIG catalogue with his two albums À Claude (2021) and Im Wald (2022), and the violinist Paride Losacco (2005), who, at a very young age, has already started a research path in the field of contemporary music: a pupil of Francesco D'Orazio, he won the last edition of the 'Riccardo Cerocchi' prize, also obtaining the 'Goffredo Petrassi' prize. With Otto Lamenti (2019), Boccuzzi invites the performer and the listener to enter an artificial space animated by different and contrasting emotional contexts: from the evocation of the mother's deep sorrow in prayer to the (no less serious!) complaint of the dog that wants to get out; from the darkest discomfort to the annoyance at the arrival of the bill to pay. The music is fragmented, theatrical and at times minimalist. Brief musical gestures follow each other nervously, interrupting the silence that is the glue of the entire composition. With unsteady musical breathing, abrupt and explosive passages give way to long, solitary sounds, while elsewhere dramatic cadences dissolve into moments of stasis from which melodies emerge here and there. In the finale, a subdued exaudi, a few fragments are sung sotto voce. The piece was premiered in Italy by Paride Losacco in September 2022, during the last URTIcanti Festival in Bari.