The World Is Indeed His Keyboard

The emergence of the global village is one of the commonplaces of current conventional wisdom. A frequently lamented downside, however, is the paradoxical loss of national and regional identities. Music of all times and places can be heard anywhere in recorded form, but music from the Western classical tradition is increasingly homogenized into a sort of supranational style.

Or so we are told.

Challenging that assumption is Italian pianist Marino Formenti. He surveys 20th century keyboard music from France, Italy, Austria and the United States in “Four Nights of the Piano,� a one-man festival at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art now at midpoint.

“In this highly connected world, the different cultures still have their own unique identities,� Formenti says. “This is even stronger in Europe, where every country has its own language, its religion, its cuisine.

“[My] first idea was to present some of the best 20th century music for piano. It became natural to propose national programs, which is a way to discover what are the different qualities of these cultural identities, what kind of relation to the common tradition is there.�

Although the four programs encompass 23 pieces spanning the century chronologically and stylistically, Formenti adamantly resists the idea that they form even a personal summary.

“The festival is everything but summing up,� he says. “First of all, good music is rare--it always has been--but not that rare. I had to penalize some countries in order to avoid an eight- or 10-night festival. I would have loved to program an English night, a Hungarian one with Kurtag, Ligeti and Bartok, a German one with Lachenmann and Stockhausen, a Russian one, a Japanese one.

“The most important and beautiful thing is that, at the end, one cannot consider these countries and these programs as closed containers; the most interesting relationships are between works of different countries and different programs.�

He lists a handful of comparisons listeners could consider over his four-night effort.

“For example,� he says, “between the Variations of Webern and the Quaderno of Dallapiccola, both [12-tone], both polyphonic, both full of Mozart-like transparency and nearly Romantic intensity. Or the different kinds of graphical scores developed by Bussotti and by Haubenstock. Or the different [technical] realization of Luigi Nono’s tape for ‘. . . sofferte onde serene . . .’ and the 20-years-younger CD track for Olga Neuwirth’s ‘incidendo-fluido.’ �

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Formenti, who was born in Milan in 1965, revealed a fascination with the new and experimental quite early.

“I started to play the piano because I was a very unhappy and unquiet child,� he says. “A pediatrician told my parents that normal education would not be enough for me, so my father, who is a photographer, gave me a camera. In my memory, the photos I did were quite experimental, but my father thought they were bad. So I let the camera down (and also my father, for some years), and I took up the piano.

“When I was 9 or 10, I started to write my own pieces. Some were quite modern; I remember a Te Deum, now lost, with a cluster orgy in the organ part. Later I heard a recording that Luigi Nono made with Living Theatre--I must have been 15--and I was absolutely fascinated.�

Formenti studied piano and composition at the conservatory in his hometown and then moved to Vienna, where he quickly established an international career. He still resides there, and as a citizen of the highly connected world he mentions, conducted this interview from there via e-mail.

“Vienna still has the reputation of being one of the most important centers for classical music. That is true--culture and music above all are very highly regarded in Austrian society and [are] helped with serious subsidies from the government. I hope that won’t change.�

The rise to power of Joerg Haider’s far-right political party is a concern for Formenti, although he doesn’t think the situation is immediately dangerous because democracy and the economy are both still strong in Austria and he doesn’t support the notion of a musicians’ boycott of the country.

“The success of Mr. Haider is a very ugly thing, and I’m astonished that so many people are, in the age of universal education, still attracted by political speech that is nothing but dull and rancorous,� Formenti says.

“[It shows] an extraordinary lack of moral authority and of responsibility to play such a negative [role in] society. Any person who has a public function--so also each artist--should make this clear. For the same reason, I don’t think that it would be a good idea to boycott Austria now. One should not leave the Austrian people alone, and art can and should help us to think and to become better.�

It was in Vienna 10 years ago that he met the musicians of Klangforum Wien, a new-music ensemble with whom he has done many concerts, including his Los Angeles debut last year in a well-received performance at LACMA. Dorrance Stalvey, the museum’s director of music programs, invited Formenti to return as a solo artist and let him set the agenda.

“I had total freedom to make [the programs], and I think that the music I’m going to play is exceptionally beautiful, and also varied enough in character and technique,� Formenti says.

So there was no polite nudge toward including American music?

“I absolutely wanted to play an American program,� Formenti says. “I’m in love with America. I was only once in New York and once in Los Angeles, but I felt immediately like being electrified, over-energized. As an artist I want first to breathe the wind of the present, and the present [doesn’t exist] without America.

“There are things I already don’t like about America,� he adds. “I’m afraid that art and business are too often confused there, and that in general materialistic non-values such as money, success, beauty are too prevalent in the modern society. And I can’t accept the death penalty. But I love America.�

As tied as he is to the present, Formenti also plays the conventional repertory, including a recent all-Schubert program in Vienna and a Japanese tour in September in which he will be playing Schumann’s Konzertstucke with the Orchestra of Kobe. But his mission is the 20th century, played and heard live.

“Although I also love to play older music, and I do, I think an important task for me is to present modern music. I want to show that it is music to think about, to feel, to fall into, to reflect on, to grow with and to become better through.

“I think that we can compare the interpreter to a discoverer. The interpreter enters into a world, which is a composition, and has the duty to discover the spiritual substances in this world that can be useful for mankind.

“The score is not the composition: As Gregory Bateson said, the map is not the territory. The score is just the map; and even the one who drew the map may not know every corner of the territory, or even imagine some of the substances contained in this territory.

“The concert is for me an extremely beautiful form of communication, where the composer, the interpreter and the audience can share their experiences of being human. That’s why, in my opinion, the concert can’t be replaced [by] other forms such as CDs or the Internet, without a very big loss.�

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MARINO FORMENTI, “FOUR NIGHTS OF PIANO,� Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Dates: Monday and Thursday, 7:30 p.m. Price: $15. Phone: (323) 857-6010.