An evening with the Kobalt Trio (Irené Fiorito, violin; Lorenzo Guida, cello; Riccardo Ronda, piano), presented as part of the concert series curated by the Guido Alberto Fano Musical Archive ETS. The ensemble will perform a programme that boldly places nineteenth-century German chamber music alongside Italian instrumental music from the turn of the twentieth century. The concert will feature works by Mendelssohn, Marco Enrico Bossi, and three compositions by Guido Alberto Fano, including the first modern performance of Arcano!, a trio whose manuscript was lost and which for decades survived only as a title in a catalogue. The mystery surrounding the disappearance of Arcano! and the secrets hidden within the work is revealed fifty years later when, among forgotten tapes, a half-century-old cassette recording resurfaces, containing a live performance from 1975. The recording was made by the composer’s grandson, a fourteen-year-old seated in the audience with an old domestic cassette recorder whose fidelity was far from reassuring and a world away from today’s digital devices: hisses, crackles, coughs, and a sound veiled by dust and time. Yet it proved sufficient to bring the music back to life, thanks to the patient and passionate work of pianist Riccardo Ronda, who reconstructed the score and made it performable once again. Arcano! will be performed at the heart of the programme alongside two other works composed during the same period: Ansietà for violin and piano and Allegretto scherzoso for cello and piano. The concert will open with Trio, Op. 107 by the Lombard composer and organist Marco Enrico Bossi, who also served as Director of the Venice Conservatory from 1895 to 1902. His Trio, Op. 107 belongs to the late-Romantic tradition, while also featuring passages that explore harmonic territories considered decidedly daring for their time. The programme will conclude with one of the masterpieces of German Romanticism, Mendelssohn’s Trio, Op. 49. Following its premiere, Schumann hailed its composer as “the Mozart of our age,” recognizing in the work the inner balance that characterizes the entire output of the Hamburg-born composer.
