Klaus Mäkelä
Ilya Gringolts Igor Stravinsky
Richard Strauss

Carlo Gesualdo (ca. 1566–1613) was the most controversial composer of his time and used musical devices that weren’t widely used until the modern era such as dissonance and chromatism. Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) described Gesualdo as “one of the most personal and original musicians within my art form.” In 1960 he ‘re-composed’ three Gesualdo madrigals to mark the 400th anniversary of his birth (since then the year of his birth has changed) and its title was Momentum per Gesualdo. This work is played in conjunction with four of Gesualdo’s own motets.

Italian Pietro Locatelli (1695–1764) was one of the 18th century’s most famous violin virtuosos. In 1733 he published a collection of violin concertos entitled L’arte del violino. Locatelli amazed audiences with these concertos and set a new standard for technical skill. The first and last movements of each concerto contain a solo which is a capriccio containing an increasing level of difficulty. The most difficult of the solos is in Concerto No. 12, which the composer called Labyrinth and wrote that it was “easy to enter; difficult to escape!”

In the summer of 1886, 22-year-old Richard Strauss (1864–1949) spent a few weeks in Italy. He managed to visit Rome, Bologna, Naples, Sorrento, Salerno, and Capri and along the way he began to write a major orchestral work based on his impressions of being there. Back home in Munich he completed what was supposed to be the first of many tone poems: Aus Italien (“From Italy”). The music resembles a symphony in four movements which describes the various places on the journey: On the Roman Campagna, In the Ruins of Rome, At the Beach at Sorrento and Neapolitan Folk Life.