Book presentation: Music as Dream: Essays on Giacinto Scelsi: Franco Sciannameo and Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini, editors
The Spring 2014 concert series will commence on Wednesday, March 5, 2014 at 7 PM with a recital by pioneering cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, the leading proponent of music by Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988). Her program will include the U.S. premiere of Scelsi’s Il Funerale di Carlo Magnofor two-bowed cello (1978) and the World Premiere of Uitti’s own Homage to Giacinto Scelsi. Preceding her performance, she will speak with Franco Sciannameo and Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini, editors of the 2013 collection Music as Dream: Essays on Giacinto Scelsi.
Frances-Marie Uitti, composer/performer, pioneered a revolutionary dimension to the cello by transforming it for the first time into a polyphonic instrument capable of sustained chordal (two, three, and four-part) and intricate multivoiced writing. Using two bows in one hand, this invention permits contemporaneous cross accents, multiple timbres, contrasting 4-voiced dynamics, simultaneous legato vs articulated playing. György Kurtág, Luigi Nono, Giacinto Scelsi, Jonathan Harvey, Richard Barrett, Horatio Radulescu, Lisa Bielawa are among many who have used this technique in their works dedicated to her.
"The spectacularly gifted cellist Frances-Marie Uitti has made a career out of demolishing musical boundaries. She has developed new techniques (most famously, playing with two bows simultaneously), collaborated with a who's who of contemporary composers, and pushed the cello into realms of unexpected beauty and expression.... Uitti showed why she might be the most interesting cellist on the planet." –The Washington Post
