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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fabio Vacchi (pronounced "Vahkie") is an Italian composer born in 1949 in Bologna.
He studied at the G.B. Martini Conservatory of Bologna with Giacomo Manzoni and Tito Gotti. In 1974 he participated in the courses of the Tanglewood Festival in the USA, where he was awarded the Koussevitzky Prize in Composition. In 1976 he won first prize at the Gaudeamus Composition Competition in the Netherlands, with the work Les soupirs de Geneviève for 11 string soloists. He debuted at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Festival in 1982 with Girotondo, an opera in two acts with a libretto adapted from Arthur Schnitzler. Following this opera come, in the 1990s, Il Viaggio, La station thermale, produced afterwards at the La Scala Opera House, and Les oiseaux de passage, and in 2003 Il letto della Storia, with a libretto by Franco Marcoaldi.
In addition to the piece, Muti, which he conducted as Music Director of the Filarmonica della Scala, he also conducted Diario dello Sdegno (Teatro alla Scala, 2003), written by Vacchi in the emotional aftermath of September 11, 2001 and the international conflicts that followed. After its première in Milan, this piece was performed in Brussels during Italy’s turn of holding the presidency of the European Union. Ethical themes are dear to Vacchi and they are evident in other compositions of his, such as Irini, Esselam, Shalom (2004) for voice, violin and orchestra, which deals with the theme of peace, reflecting upon sagely texts of the monotheistic religions.
On a commission from Abbado, Vacchi then composed Briefe Büchners, a cycle of lieder which was performed by the Berliner Philharmonie in 1998.
Worthy of mention is the recent Voci di notte (2006), commissioned and performed by the Orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, on occasion of the 70th birthday of their conductor Zubin Mehta.
Since his early compositions, Fabio Vacchi has taken on the challenge of reaching beyond the closed and inside circle of connoisseurs, maintaining the objective of writing music for those who do not habitually listen to contemporary music (adapting to music the ideas of Hans Magnus Enzensberger). His creative process, rather than radically rejecting traditional codes, seeks to privilege a focus on the material, understood as an attention given to sound and to the human body that is that sound’s very destination. Vacchi, thus, believes that it is indispensable not to overlook the psycho-acoustic parameters that allow music to reach the listener and stimulate his or her senses. Such techniques include the repetition of certain elements as the work unfolds and the insertion of continuous but recognizable sonorous material, so as to keep the listener attentive and alert.
In Vacchi’s conception of music, the sonorous material that a composer chooses to utilize is less important than the way in which it is presented: the work’s form must communicate a sense of itself and must establish a system in which there is expectation and surprise, surprise having always been an expressive, communicative, and dramatic device used by many composers, even if unconsciously so.
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