Giorno della memoria
International Holocaust Remembrance Day
Luciano Chessa in concert with Frances-Marie Uitti
Friday, January 27th, 2023 - 6:30pm
Italian Cultural Institute / INNOVIT
710 Sansome St - San Francisco, CA 94111
Free Admission | Registration required
The Leonardo da Vinci Society is proud to co-present with the Italian Cultural Institute a concert by long time friend LUCIANO CHESSA as the Commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco, under the patronage of the Consulate General of Italy in San Francisco, commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a concert curated by Luciano Chessa and featuring Frances-Marie Uitti (cello, voice) and Chessa (piano, voice). The program includes two works, both inspired by Primo Levi.
The opening piece, QUEST[O] (for cello, piano, and voices), is designed by Luciano Chessa and Frances-Marie Uitti both to coexist with and to live alongside a selection of texts by Levi that directly address the theme of the Holocaust.
The second half of the program features the West Coast premiere of Luciano Chessa’s Piombo, a piece for solo cello written for Frances-Marie Uitti, and based on the chapter of the same name from Primo Levi’s book The Periodic Table. Using the two-bows technique that Uitti introduced and has employed since the 1970s—a technique that reveals unexpected polyphonic virtues of the cello—the piece alternates primordial rhythmic obsession with an expansive diatonic sound world.
Co-presented by the Leonardo da Vinci Society of San Francisco.
LUCIANO CHESSA
Luciano Chessa is a composer, conductor, audiovisual and performance artist, and music historian. His performance of "intensely visual scores" in a concert he curated for NYC's Roulette last December, has been named "gripping" by The New York Times' chief classical music critic Anthony Tommasini. Chessa's compositions include Cromlech, a large organ piece he premiered in Melbourne’s Town Hall in May 2018 as part of a solo organ recital that received over 2,200 ticket bookings; the opera Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago—a work merging experimental theater with reality TV which required from the cast over 55 hours of fasting—and A Heavenly Act, an opera commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with original video by Kalup Linzy.
FRANCES-MARIE UITTI
Frances-Marie Uitti's ceaseless curiosity to conjure ever more possibilities from her cello—for example by playing with two bows, or by inventing entirely new instruments such as the all sensor 12 string double bridged cello—has inspired leading composers such as György Kurtág, Luigi Nono, and Jonathan Harvey to write new music especially for her. She collaborated with legendary artists such as John Cage and Marina Abramović, and was described "arguably the world's most influentially experimental cellist" by The Guardian.
"The spectacularly gifted cellist, Frances-Marie Uitti has made a career out of demolishing musical boundaries. She has developed new techniques (most famously, playing with two bows simultaneously), collaborated with a who's who of contemporary composers, and pushed the cello into realms of unexpected beauty and expression... Uitti showed why she might be the most interesting cellist on the planet." Washington Post