Benjie Sanders,
The Arizona Daily Star
Giampaolo Bracali
From the January 14, 1997 Arizona Daily Star and Starnet
PREVIEW
The American String Quartet offers the Arizona premiere of Giampaolo Bracali's String Quartet No. 2, plus works by Haydn and Brahms, tomorrow at 8 p.m. at the Tucson Convention Center Leo Rich Theater. Tickets, available only at the door, cost $14 general, $4 for students.
Benjie Sanders,
The Arizona Daily Star
Giampaolo Bracali
By Ken Keuffel Jr.
The Arizona Daily Star
Giampaolo Bracali, who tomorrow becomes the first composer to hear his work performed at an Arizona Friends of Chamber Music concert, still appreciates his former teachers.
In addition to composition, Bracali, a Rome native, studied piano and conducting in that city's Saint Cecilia Conservatory of Music in the 1960s. Bracali, an award-winning composer with numerous orchestral and chamber works to his credit, might have devoted most of his time to piano at Saint Cecilia, were it not for Virgilio Mortari, one of his composition teachers.
``He (Mortari) pushed me to do more composing,'' Bracali said in a recent interview. ``And eventually, I found it more challenging to compose.''
Bracali never forgot his late mentor, who, among other things, wrote a cello concerto for Mstislav Rostropovich. During yearly visits to Italy, he frequently sought Mortari's suggestions for various compositions.
And in Mortari's memory, Bracali, now a composition professor at New York's Manhattan School of Music, decided to begin his String Quartet No. 2 with an Elegia movement.
(Tomorrow, the American String Quartet, for which this work was written, offers the Arizona premiere at the Tucson Convention Center Leo Rich Theater.)
Clearly, this Elegia, coupled with the five movements that follow it, lacks the melodiousness of, say, a Mozart or Haydn quartet. But it is sufficiently conventional to meet the Arizona Friends' criteria for new music. These include limits on such audience-busting elements as atonality and dissonance, according to Jean-Paul Bierny, the Friends' president.
Now in its 49th season, the Friends recently announced that it would present at least one challenging yet accessible work by a living composer at each of its concerts. Bracali, whose appearance underscores this commitment, concurred with the Friends' assessment of his music. ``This piece has strong roots in tonality,'' he said. ``It also uses classical forms.''
Bracali praised the Friends' efforts to present more new or recently composed music. ``It (new music) is a question of exposure,'' he said. ``(Initially), one doesn't like what one doesn't know. But you'd be surprised (at how often) the reaction is positive.''
Bracali, who will make brief introductory remarks about his piece before its performance, called the Elegia somewhat sad music that begins in ``atmospheric'' fashion and eventually introduces ``the cells of a theme'' in the cello part. Also of note is Rapsodia, an intense section in which a crescendo climaxes in several cadenza-like passages. A concluding Epilogo movement reprises some of the Elegia's material.
Mortari - and later, Nadia Boulanger, the famed teacher of such composers as Copland, Bernstein and Barber - must have been teaching Bracali something right. In 1967, for instance, judged by such composers as Stravinsky and Copland, Bracali became the first Italian composer to win the prestigious Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund award - an honor named for Nadia Boulanger's short-lived composer-sister.
His compositions have been performed by the Tokyo String Quartet, the Kronos String Quartet and the Manhattan Brass Ensemble, as well as numerous Italian and American orchestras.
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