Hungarian Festival: wild Magyar rhythms in Pietrasanta

The Tuscan town of Pietrasanta has nominated itself as the Italian Capital of Contemporary Art 2027, and on the façade of the cathedral a lively videomapping traces, with graphic and colour effects, the history of a place renowned for its marble working, its galleries and its art ateliers; the land of Botero, Mitoraj, the Tommasi, loved by many artists of today, such as the Korean sculptor Park Eun-Sun. The concluding concert of Pietrasanta in concerto, the festival that the enthusiasm of violinist Michael Guttman has made a summer musical landmark for almost twenty years, is also a way of affirming Pietrasanta's vocation for contemporaneity, which lives here in sculpture, painting, and also music.

Hungarian Feast is the title of the evening, with unbridled Magyar rhythms and persuasive gypsy melodies revisited with today's sensitivity and rendered with enthralling momentum by the virtuosity of Jeno Lisztes playing the characteristic cymbalom, the pyrotechnic violinism of Guttman himself, and the skill of the young strings of the Brussels Chamber Orchestra.

A great deal of contemporary and twentieth-century music was also heard in this edition of Pietrasanta in concert, eloquently entitled Music without Frontiers: the classics, but with rarely performed pieces, the tango, and Brazilian music, such as that of Antonio Santana, present in Pietrasanta to witness the Italian premiere of his Trio. Italian premiere also for Avner Dorman's Concerto for mandolin and strings, a 2006 piece commissioned by one of the most acclaimed virtuosi of the instrument today, Avi Avital. And he was there to perform it, in the atmospheric Chiostro di Sant'Agostino, accompanied by the Brussel Chamber Orchestra, which was the instrumental ensemble in residence this year.

Avi Avital has a superb technical mastery, an elegant agility and, above all, an interpretative magnetism that gives you no respite: and that is how he was able to render the Dorman Concerto in all its teeming with continuous ideas, like those of a quivering rhapsody. With him on the same evening was another virtuoso, flutist Andrea Griminelli. Shining sound and disruptive ease Griminelli showed in Vivaldi's Concerto RV 433 'La tempesta di mare', pleasant fluidity and elegance in the legato when he presented (it was a world premiere) the adaptation for his own instrument of Rossini's Introduction, Theme and Variations, which he had intended for the clarinet. And it is a version that does not make one regret the original. Then Avital and Griminelli come together for Vivaldi's Concerto RV 532. Avital captivates with his personality, Griminelli is charmant. What emerges is not a duel between virtuosi, however tangible the virtuosity in both is, but a harmony governed by mutual respect. And animating it is a spirit of enjoyment that finds its response in the enthusiasm of the audience.

Pietrasanta in concert 2025