If you are planning to attend the City of Chicago`s annual Venetian Night celebration this weekend at Grant Park, you can expect a jolt of serious new music along with the expected parade of boats, a fireworks display and other popular frivolities.
That`s because the Grant Park Symphony concert, 6:30 p.m. Saturday at the Petrillo Music Shell, will contain a substantial new work, Chicago composer Frank Abbinanti`s ”Come Una Forza di Luce” (”Like a Force of Light”).
The cantata will receive its world premiere on a program otherwise devoted to lighter fare, including orchestral bits and pieces from Italian opera by Rossini, Verdi and Puccini, also Respighi`s ”The Pines of Rome.”
”My Italian friends will kill me for saying this, but I have never liked Verdi or Puccini, nor have I been directly influenced by them,” the 42-year- old Chicago composer admits. Pressed to cite creative figures who have influenced him, he mentions Richard Wagner in the last century, and Charles Ives, Pierre Boulez and artist Anselm Kiefer in our own.
Mind you, Abbinanti doesn`t mind sharing a pops program with such illustrious predecessors as Verdi, Puccini and Respighi; in fact, he welcomes it.
”This concert is a way of taking stock, like going to an Italian festival and seeing old friends,” he says, a smile breaking through his thick black beard. ”It sort of reminds you of where you were, and where you are.” For him the opportunity to write a big work in honor of the quincentenary of Columbus` voyage was too juicy to pass up. He proposed a commissioned work several years ago to Grant Park, but the idea didn`t gather momentum until last year, when the Italian Cultural Institute agreed to fund the piece in cooperation with the Joint Civic Committee of Italian-Americans. Abbinanti is musical adviser to the institute.
”Like a Force of Light” takes the listener on a metaphorical voyage of the human spirit, as reflected in the words of such diverse Italian writers as Dante Alighieri, Giacomo Leopardi and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The 25-minute cantata is scored for a huge percussion-laden orchestra with soprano, alto, tenor and bass soloists, and represents the composer`s largest-scaled work.
The last lectures of Italian novelist Italo Calvino (who died in 1988)
provided Abbinanti with his unifying theme: light. Not only the nourishing light of the sun, but also the light of boundless human imagination and intellect, the light that shines through the power of artistic creation. Hence the title.
”Light has always struck me as a tremendous metaphor for orchestration and sonority,” Abbinanti explains. ”For me it goes back to my first hearing of the chord clusters in Ives` `Concord` Sonata. That image of light has remained with me. How do you explain such moments in music? That`s what I want my music to be.”
It was no accident that a composer often drawn to widely ranging historical and socio-political subject matter should find the literary basis for his Columbus cantata in Italian poetry and prose spanning six centuries. His rich palette of vocal and instrumental sounds both colors the chosen texts and shapes them into a coherent artistic unity.
From the ”Paradise” cantos of Dante`s ”Divine Comedy,” Abbinanti borrowed the idea of eternal light. Leopardi, a contemporary of Beethoven and Goethe, inspired a ”grand quartetto” on moonlight. From the poetry of Pasolini, best known as a modernist-realist filmmaker, he fashioned a recitation (”The Resistance of Light”) about a boy who leaves home to fight his country`s invaders.
The widely performed composer of more than 50 works, Abbinanti is perhaps best known around town for his illuminating lecture-recitals on contemporary music, which he performs from the piano. In recent years, his attention has turned increasingly to Europe, where he regularly performs and where he has been commissioned by a new-music institute in Germany to compose an oratorio about the Lutheran Reformation, for premiere in 1994.
But in everything he does in music, Abbinanti says, he is fiercely determined to expand the artistic boundaries as far as he can.
”We, as composers, shouldn`t be afraid to try things that haven`t been tried before. As my former teacher, Ralph Shapey, used to say, `Smash the rules against the wall and see what happens!”`
