“Debussy – preraffaellita, impressionista, simbolista, astrattista” is the title of the concert on November at 9 pm at the Ridotto of the Masini Theatre in Faenza. Piero Rattalino, critic and musicologist, will introduce and explain the music played by the South Korean pianist Ilia Kim.
This is an opportunity to explore the Debussy’s pieces through various artistic currents from the twenties and twentieth century.
The centenary of Debussy’s death happens when his figure is at the centre of critics and when they recognize him as one of the artists who represent the turning point between two great epochs in the history of music, nineteenth-century romanticism and twentieth-century modernity . At the time of his first affirmation, Debussy was seen as an impressionist, as the equivalent in music of pictorial expressionism. It was an almost unavoidable location but that, considering his relations with Mallarmé and Maeterlinck, they began to consider him as a symbolist. And his belonging to symbolism is certainly the one that best defines, in a general sense, Debussy’s art. But Debussy had composed his first masterpiece, La Damoiselle élue, based on the text of Dante Gabriele Rossetti, an exponent of the major pre-Raphaelites, and his latest creations were contemporary, in time and spirit, of the birth of abstractionism at work of Mondrian. In his piano production we find the signs of his evolution and through it we can therefore briefly go over the different moments of his poetics, not only as an artist but, one might say, as a “ferryman” of music, in parallel with the passage of all the arts from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
The pianist and musicologist Piero Rattalino, the most famous and expert among Italian critics, will present and explain better these artistic connections to the public. Rattalino, awarded by the Ministry of Education with the gold medal of the merit of art, culture and education, has held important institutional positions in Italy and in the world, he has been for thirty years a piano teacher in the “G. Verdi” in Milan, and being part of numerous international competitions.
Interpreter and creator of the concert is the sophisticated South Korean pianist Ilia Kim, former pupil of Rattalino in Imola from 1997 to 2000. Ilia Kim began her studies in her native country, immediately attracting international attention thanks to the precocity of her talent . Winner of numerous scholarships at home and abroad until arriving in Italy, since then she has held concerts in every corner of the world, also participating in prestigious festivals, as in 2007 when she performed at the Pavilhão Atlântico in Lisbon, in front of 9000 spectators.