On Saturday, November 9, I attended a concert by the German vocal ensemble Neue Vocalsolisten at the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone in Rome, as part of the Roman festival "Romaeuropa." As soon as I saw their name in the program with an 'A Cappella' concert, I felt a strong sense of excitement at an uncommon opportunity to see a group that, in its by now forty years of activity, has acquired the status of legend for the excellence of its performances and for a repertoire that has taken them across the tradition of vocal music, from Carlo Gesualdo's madrigals to the most modern composers. Just this year they accompanied Alessandro Bosetti on his "Portraits de voix," released on Kohlaas (in this writer's opinion, one of the most beautiful and intense records of this 2024). On that occasion, a five-member lineup of the ensemble had performed a series of 'contemporary madrigals' interwoven with the vocal portraits elaborated by Bosetti, confirming the ensemble's versatility and its utterly unique ability to reinvent ancient musical forms for today's audience.
What distinguishes the Neue Vocalsolisten is their skill in navigating a repertoire that spans almost a millennium of music, constantly collaborating with contemporary and emerging composers. Their mastery of extended vocal techniques, combined with an instrumental use of the voice, makes each of their performances a unique and unrepeatable event, capable of shaping contemporary musical thought as much as of bringing to the stage an idea of music that crosses the boundaries between tradition and avant-garde.
For the concert at the Teatro Studio Borgna, the Stuttgart ensemble staged four pieces by composers who are fellows of the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo – Ondrej Adámek, Oscar Bianchi, Carola Bauckholt and Gordon Kampe – alternating between six and four unamplified voices, instruments, objects and turntables. As one might have expected, the performance was impeccable, with a surgical precision that allowed the sounds to fill the space, turning the concert into an enveloping experience. The audience was not faced with a merely frontal show, but with an immersive experience that involved everyone present, generating a sense of collective participation.
The opening piece, composed by Ondrej Adámek, saw the six singers cross the entire stage space, starting from the back of the hall and moving among the audience, throwing objects such as stones and corrugated conduit pipes. This gesture, besides demonstrating the ensemble's mastery in integrating performative elements, underlined their multidimensional approach to sound and theatricality. The next piece, 'Ante Litteram' by Oscar Bianchi, brought the hall back to a more traditional atmosphere, though steeped in a twentieth-century tension, revealing a delicacy and rigor that highlighted the ensemble's ability to move smoothly from moments of great energy to sections devoted more to the exploration of vocal sounds.
The greatest surprise was the lightness with which the Neue Vocalsolisten tackled complex and demanding scores. I asked myself, while listening: is it really possible to combine experimental writing and executive precision with an almost playful approach? The answer was a resounding yes, with all due respect to the purists who might turn up their noses at such a free and unconventional interpretation of contemporary music.
Accustomed to the scant programming of written contemporary music in my region, this immersion – brief as it was, and always too brief – in a total exploration of acoustic sound (but not only, as shown by Gordon Kampe's piece for voices and turntable, in which the six vocalists even tried their hand at some scratching) made this evening all the more precious. The Neue Vocalsolisten's exploration was a breath of fresh air, a demonstration that one can search and innovate without remaining trapped in the conventions imposed by a plastered-over tradition, freeing oneself from the chains of the very serious tradition monopolized by Stockhausen and his derivatives, treading the paths of the academy without being devoured by it. What a relief!
Sonic inventions in which the vocal possibilities of the various registers range widely, expanding and blending even further the various outputs explored over half a century of research on vocal music, and in which the singer is not relegated to the 'mere' role of voice but is a complete performer, perfectly embodying the model of those who today put themselves to the test in vocal research.
On the margins of this brief review, to which we wanted to give space in order to present an essential ensemble to those who might not know it, I would like to add a very small reflection on the health of Italian research music. Not so much on its protagonists, who are not lacking and often present work of absolute quality. And precisely for this reason, how is it possible that such a great distance is felt between those interested in musical practices and the more research-oriented experiences, or even, within the same community, between those that derive more directly from tradition and those that are more 'disruptive'? Beyond the circuit of the traditional opera houses, by now mired in a conservative spiral that will perhaps accompany them to their end – at the expense of taxpayers and of all those realities that see less and less FUS funding arrive with each cycle – how is it possible to reach those who already attend concerts by timid imitators of performers of this kind? And why, above all, do the vast majority of Italian festivals insist on pulling out the usual agency names, leveling downward a program that, already in terms of numbers, infrastructure and economies, certainly cannot rival the biggest European festivals in quality and variety?
To all the associations, festivals and collectives that persist in making original proposals, of quality and research, outside the commercial circuits of the usual agencies – whose artists we can nonetheless see with pleasure in broader contexts, as happens at European festivals – thank you for resisting and believing in this losing bet that is music organizing in Italy. And to everyone the appeal is to make an effort, to seek out, to move in order to fill the venues with a program outside the usual patterns and the usual aestheticizing, Instagram-friendly choices, even putting up with discomforts or glossing over, where possible, organizational problems (which even in Rome offered some almost embarrassing moments and heavy shortcomings, but we will turn a blind eye). Otherwise, musical research will be talked about only through controversial announcements, creating polarizations and drawing out of herds of commentators who often have nothing to do with experimentation rhetoric better suited to an electorate of a certain right. And music, as usual, stays hidden under the rug.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →