VIA CRUCIS DALLE SCELTE RADICALI

A “VIA CRUCIS” IN THE SIGN OF RADICAL CHOICES

The (Turin) Unione Musicale has decided to reward on Sunday its public, in the Conservatorio Concert Hall, with a program that it is likely to be listened only in the occasion of an anniversary, provided that this is used to go judiciously deep inside the less known pages.

Well, the “Coro Filarmonico Ruggero Maghini”, directed by Claudio Chiavazza, and the organist Luca Benedicti have performed a series of choral pages written by Liszt in a crucial moment of his life, after taking minor holy orders in 1865 and definitively dropping his career as a transcendental pianist.

The artists has not chosen ordinary pieces, but the original tone of the “Via Crucis”, in which Liszt recalls the bare severity of Gregorian chant and of Lutheran chorals and writes solo organ pieces to comment upon the fourteen stations of Christ’s suffering. He realizes this in his own way, often proceeding with visionary fragments of harmony, so that the Gregorian paradigm is alternate with sections in which the organ  shares the same audacities that Wagner employed in theatre.

Benedicti has revealed them with great clearness, alternating the short dramatic peaks with sensitive tones that act as a rough support to the choir.

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This “Via Crucis” confirms itself as a radical choice, and this even more strongly if compared to the balm by Brahms and Mendelssohn, offered as encore.