Last appointment with the cycle "Talking about books", as part of the 2018/19 lyric season.

 

"Exercises of memory" collects the essays on Gioachino Rossini written by Arrigo Quattrocchi (1961-2009), musicologist and critic among the brightest of his generation, throughout his career.

 

The idealistic historiography, influenced by Rossini himself, established a correspondence between his vocation for the funny genre and his facetious and indolent nature. The modern reacquisition of his dramatic theater has led to an overall rethinking of this image, restoring a far more complex artistic sionomia, linked to an elusive and neurotic personality. Designed by Quattrocchi before the untimely death in 2009, "Exercises of memory" offers an excursus from its origins to the developments of this Rossini-renaissance, and thanks to the curatorship of Daniela Macchione and Alessandra Quattrocchi also includes the collection of Rossini reviews that the author wrote in twenty years of collaboration with the manifesto, at the Rossini Opera Festival and elsewhere, in Italy and beyond.

 

The ruthless and amused analysis of Rossini's scenic tradition is added to the essays - among others - on Cinderella and Adina, on Rossini in the Roman academies or on Rossini alla Scala. The "Eduardo e Cristina" studio is instead a fundamental touchstone of the technique of self-employed cars: the recurrence, in Rossini's work, of the same musical cues and entire sections or closed numbers is not just a phenomenon linked to the needs of the circuit author-production-fruition, but a real compositional technique, peculiar to the musical culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

 

Gioachino Rossini was the most dear author to Arrigo Quattrocchi, who in "Esercizi di memoria" composes a passionate critical portrait that embraces compositional strategies, theatrical practice and musical poetics of one of the greatest operas in the history of music.