Concert Al Buio

Description

This is a highly unusual work intended to be listened to in complete darkness, one of a series of 'Concerts in the Dark' held at Area Sismica, in Italy. Remastered by Bob Drake, this excellent, very high-quality recording made at the event, captures the experience - the intense atmosphere as much as the minutely focused performance. This is not a conventional piece for piano or what you'd expect of a well-lit improvisation it make the most of sounds coming from the dark, with visual source of information to explain them. Matteo Ramon Arevalos, by day a virtuoso concert pianist, works here interactively with the whole instrument, inside and out, with a focus on sound and gesture - as well as some extraordinary extended technical mastery - to create clouds of pure sound, passages of mystery, stretches of stylistic inference - and a timeless finale. At the end it's hard to believe that 43 minutes have passed. Especially if you listen in the dark. Pianist and composer Matteo Ramon Arevalos came from a musical family, playing first drums then piano, before studying composition. In 1996 he graduated in piano with honours from the Conservatory B. Maderna in Cesena, continuing his studies thereafter in Vienna, New York, Lugano and Paris. As concert pianist, he is primarily a soloist, specialising in contemporary classical music and his own compositions. He collaborates regularly with theatre companies, most recently Societas Claudia Castellucci in the opera Fisica dell'aspra comunione, for the 2021 Venice Dance Biennale. Film composition work has included Elisabetta Sgarbi's Raffaello - La Stanza della Segnatura (2010), Hanspeter Ammann's Late Penang Afternoon (2017) and Nicolas Isasi's short Out of mind (2021), which won best soundtrack at the Tamilnadu International Film Festival in 2022. He composed music for the show Leo uno sguardo bambino sul mondo (2019), by Drammatico Vegetale, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo Da Vinci's death and was commissioned, in 2023, by the Italian Embassy in Riga, and the Italian Cultural Institutes in Warsaw and Krakow, to create a Europa Suite for voice, flute, violin, guitar and piano, dedicated to all people involuntarily compromised by war, that was premiered at the Witold Lutoslawski Concert Studio of Polish Radio, in Warsaw, in 2024. His CD Teleion - Fragments of Ancient Greek Music, with singer Camilla Lopez (a regular collaborator), released by Tunite music, was nominated best CD of the year in Tallinn. Other CD releases include La Folia (2023), Mystic View (2022) and Leo (2025) - and three CDs for ReR Megacorp, Messiaen et autour de Messiaen (2008), Serimpie (2013) - both for piano and l'ondes Martenot - and Per Piano (2017) featuring music by Fausto Razzi.