Music even enables us to travel in time, to find ourselves hundreds of years away, in places seen through the eyes of a woman or a man of that time who transmits them to another human being today. And somehow it is the records, even more than the concerts, that enable us to participate in the very moment in which that journey takes shape.
Indeed, they really contain it all. Precisely because it’s not (just) a disc: this is a concert, and it somehow replicates going to that concert. It is a place, it is a story made up of many stories. I experience music as a responsibility and for me the choice of a concert programme is part of that responsibility. So how did it start, this experience that you now hold between your hands? With friends of the Fenice Philharmonic Orchestra who about a year before the concert you are about to listen to – or have perhaps already listened to – came to see me saying “We want to work with you and we will everything we can to make it happen.” They succeeded, even though during that first meeting I still didn’t know if I would be able to conduct an entire programmeme. About six months later, we met again in a hotel in Mestre and they told me that they were ready; I replied that I didn’t know if I was, but that I would do it anyway.

As always, I believe it is essential to ask others what it is they want to together. And their request was born from this principle: it had to include the Symphony No. 4 Op. 90 by Mendelssohn, known as the “Italian”, as well as something of my own composition. So I thought about it and proposed Bach, Bosso and Mendelssohn. Strange combination, right? Yet without Mendelssohn, Bach would have been forgotten. After his death, for many reasons, his scores were lost or forgotten. But Felix loved Bach, for him he was a role model and progenitor exactly as Beethoven was: in addition to playing, directing and composing extraordinary music, our Felix was also part of the only choir that in his day still sang Bach. It was this very activity which gave him access to the score of the Passion according to Matthew, which he then reconstructed and which at the first performance was so successful that Bach’s scores returned to circulation. In addition, Mendelssohn is like a brother to Bosso. His use of timbre, indeed his search for new timbres, are an inspiration to me. He is a man who has helped to shape great changes, after all it was he who contributed in a decisive way to the development of romanticism, shaping it from the existing classical rules of musical composition.
From Mendelssohn we thus arrive directly at “Esoconcerto”, the first concerto for violin and orchestra that I ever wrote, based on the three principles of creation and the three principles of the concerto, representing an initiatory path: that of every creator of art.
In “Esoconcerto” there are several hidden elements. I’ll reveal two of them. One is my beloved Bach, and his love for Vivaldi and his violin concertos. The other is that it contains a tribute to a concert that revolutionised the history of violin concerts: the Concerto Op. 64 in E minorby Mendelssohn. So as if by magic, the newcomer acts as a bridge between the other two. And ultimately it is so because we performers are, above all, bridges: bridges connecting yesterday with today and tomorrow.
I mentioned Vivaldi and Bach’s love for his music: and Vivaldi was from Venice. That’s why I chose Bach’s third Brandenburg, which is one of his most Vivaldi-like concerts, and with friends in the orchestra I worked on a sound that would link modern instruments we use today with those of antiquity, respecting the tones and musicality of the times of Bach, but staying faithful to the sense of experimental research that is always present in these concerts. There is also another funny little anecdote, about Bach’s passion for Vivaldi. Bach transcribed so many of the Venetian’s works, including an adagio for the organ – as famous then as it is now – transcribed from the adagio of an oboe concerto, but also that of the “Anonymous Venetian”! Too bad that Bach was confused, and that that concert was not in fact by Vivaldi but by Alessandro Marcello! So I decided to improvise on Bach’s transcription, as a cadenza for the adagio. To honour my host city but also because it made me smile, to think about Bach and how much he wanted to be Venetian.

What a lot of Venice, given that Bosso also studied there too… But of course this brings us to Italy’s extensive influence on masterpieces more generally, not to mention its production of them. The “Italian” symphony encompasses a vision of Italy – its four movements are descriptions of Mendelssohn’s trip to Italy. In 1829, Mendelssohn and his wife set off for what at the time was called the Grand Tour, a fashion exalted by Goethe, the greatest intellectual of the time. One could not call oneself an artist without visiting Italy, in Goethe’s opinion. Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples were the main cities. And it was during this journey that Mendelssohn wrote this symphony, performed in 1833 in London, where Bosso later lived among other things…
These notes represent his final gesture, of the time he is living in, of his traditions; and for us performers they become the first gesture in bringing him closer to those who listen to us. We are a go-between. For this reason, in addition to musical thought, it is necessary to study the era, the composer’s ideas and also his experiences. We must study the instruments as they worked at the time, to bring them into being via those of today. Studying music is an opportunity to study everything,and with this symphony Mendelssohn makes it easy for us. The letters he writes to his sister and his notes show us the path to take through his score. The first movement is defined by the encounter with the light of Italy, its frenzy, joy, and complexity. In the chiaroscuro of the masterpiece of pain and hope that is the Andante con moto, he tells of having attended a funeral in Naples and of how he was so impressed by the blackness that overcame everybody, to then make way for that immense light and hope that he saw all around. While in Venice he tells of a poem about fairies written there by Goethe and from which he takes inspiration for the magical tone of his minuet. Then he goes back to the south, home to the ‘tarantolati’ and the ‘saltarello’… Those notes encapsulate all of this, it forms part of our studies.

But even though it always contains a story within it, music is itself the most beautiful story: “there are more things in heaven and on earth than in all your philosophy”, as Hamlet says to the good Horace. Indeed, in short, this is not (only) a record. But rather a story, a journey, a space to enter – and a concert to participate in.
There is also the idea of sound, that which you will hear here: one philosophy that accompanies every recording I make is that it is not only about listening but also about participation. Recordings are above all an opportunity to continue to make music and grow. You can follow the breath from that past moment to yours today. Because music is a wealth that must be shared.

For all these reasons, this isn’t (just) a record. It contains too many things: the passion of seventy people, a wonderful soloist, and all our stories. It contains the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, 2004, and 2016. For me every time I play it’s like being reborn, but in this case, it really is a rebirth. That day I made it, thanks to all my companions on the journey. Here is both the music I come from and the one I have created, and there is still so much to discover. But it is no coincidence that all this took place in the Fenice theatre – ‘fenice’ after all means phoenix in Italian making it just the right name for a magical album dedicated to music: music that has the power to revive something, to bring something back into being, every time it is played. Just as every time this album is played it will have the power to recreate that rebirth.
Welcome to the most beautiful theatre in the world, welcome to La Fenice.

Ezio Bosso

I have collected and am still collecting their words and their accounts, absolutely anything – even objects – that could be considered a reply from the people I spoke to: photographs, poems, letters, sounds, paintings. Perhaps the most moving things are the old photos which depict parents and I recall a phrase: “I originate from that smile and that same smile is all that remains of them.

Basically, also this brief anthology represents some of the things that remain and, also in this case, I asked and shared choices with other people. The things that remain, written by myself and chosen by those I love, by those who follow me; I wish to be clear, there’s also something that I chose personally, together with Luciano who has supervised this anthology: I haven’t left everyone else to do all the hard work …

I hope it will be like this: a short trip to Ezio’s era, to that 10-year period packed with life experiences and recordings. In any form: as an orchestra, a quartet, as a conductor-organist and obviously as a pianist.
One of the magical aspects of music is that it allows you to travel in time, to make time stand still, to make it either expand or make it shorter. It’s just like the voyage undertaken by an astronaut inside a black hole. I will be happy if you like these choices; obviously, I would have included more tracks but, Sony Classics, my new recording company, has told me that the ones we have chosen have already filled up two CDs… As this is the first project that we have worked on together, I decided to include some new tracks. One of them is Unconditioned, Following A Bird which I think, by now, has become the most well-known piece that I have ever written, yet this is a version which is both old and new at the same time (always due to that free, magical power): the version written for cello and piano which derived from the one originally written for violin. One day I may also have to record that version, who knows? So you will have the chance to choose which one represents you the most.

The other piece refers to an adverse weather condition that, up until now, I have never had the courage to narrate in detail, perhaps because it the one which frightens us the most: “grandine” in Italian, which in English is hailstones and hailstorm (it’s true, everything sounds cooler in English …). This is the most devastating weather condition that exists and also the most absurd; it is truly the sky which falls onto the earth, as the Celts once told, and no-one likes that phenomenon that comes from the largest, awe-inspiring cumulonimbus clouds that they also called “the King of Clouds.” If you are afraid of hailstones, its violent noise and its majesty are often associated with intense, excruciating pain. I finished composing this piece only a few hours before I started recording. With me, on the cello is my faithful companion, my “brate” as we call each other: Relja Lukic. His sound is truly one of the voices that I am unable to describe, you’ll hear it on this CD. I just couldn’t help inviting him to accompany me on this first adventure, yet another opening of rooms in the new recording company to which I belong.

Where did we record it? Obviously in my beloved Teatro Sociale belonging to my beloved Gualtieri and this time, we decided to go over the top by shooting a video of the recording sessions, so you could actually visit it and be there with us too! Do you think we overdid it? Of course we didn’t, after all it is great to prepare an abundance of food for those you love, and in any case, that is how it works for me, I try to do everything right up until my last breath, to dare, to try to do better and to be better.

By sheer coincidence, I discovered that this phrase is consonant with some of the poems written by our Emily (Dickinson).
Here is one of them:

Some things that fly there be–
Birds, Hours the Bumblebee–
Of these no Elegy.

Some things that stay there be–
Grief– hills–eternity–
Nor this behooveth me.

There are, that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies?
How still the Riddle lies!

While I am writing, I continue to think, over and over again, about the things that remain and I realise that the recordings, the CDs are actually one of those things that remain.
It is often what remains of the sound, the idea, the touch and above all, of a precise moment in a musician’s life.
Just like those photographs…

Ezio Bosso