Suonare a tre
Bressan, Guzzo, Contzen

Andrea Bressan, bassoon
Giovanni Guzzo, violin
Mirijam Contzen, violin

A. Falconieri (1585-1656)

Battalia de Barabaso yerno de Satanas

J. S. Bach (1685-1750)

Trio Sonata in C minor BWV 526

A. Falconieri

L’Eroica e Ciaccona

J. S. Bach

Trio Sonata in G major BWV 1039

T. Merula (1595-1665)

Ciaccona

40’ | Admission with museum ticket

“Playing as a trio” builds an intelligent and lively programme that intertwines early seventeenth-century Italian music with the great Bachian contrapuntal tradition, allowing unexpected spaces of surprise and expressive freedom to emerge along the way.

At the centre of the programme stands Andrea Falconieri, a Neapolitan composer active between Italy and Spain, one of the most original — and long overlooked — voices of seventeenth-century Europe. His Battalia de Barabaso yerno de Satanas, with its already striking and almost theatrical title, is a work of extraordinary inventiveness, in which humorous elements, imitative gestures, and virtuosic outbursts merge into a style that makes eccentricity itself a poetic principle. More restrained but no less intense is L’Eroica con ciaccona, which confirms the versatility of a composer equally at ease in playful invention and solid formal construction. In ideal dialogue with Falconieri stands Tarquinio Merula, whose Ciaccona unfolds from a ground bass that gradually transforms into an increasingly dense and hypnotic sonic organism, approaching an almost ecstatic dimension. The programme concludes with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Trio Sonatas, where contrapuntal clarity and architectural solidity restore order and depth, without extinguishing the energy and vitality running through the preceding pages.

A unique and carefully balanced programme, in which distant styles and languages respond to and reflect one another, revealing an unexpected continuity in the history of music.

Text curated by Federica Mastantuono