Paolo Teodori

Stefano Trasimeni's orchestral compositions demonstrate a real love of great music and a passion for the great symphonic frescoes; they demonstrate love and respect for the Romantic and late-Romantic tradition before all the crises and fictitious questioning about music's language and how it should be. Trasimeni's intuition as a composer jumps back decades in order to make his own the taste, sound and passion of the late nineteenth-century symphonic tradition, rightly considered the last capable of speaking through sounds because it was the last to trust in sounds. Thus, out of an instinctive rather than meditated adhesion to that form of aesthetics, he rejects all talk of crisis and every question about hypothetical but improbable and unreal forms of musical language; he rejects every hypothesis of experimentalism or that search for nothing which the avant-garde of the second half of the twentieth century became used to without ever convincing or charming the public. But, after so much talking and authentic protest, Trasimeni's music is not and does not want to be an impassioned and equally unmeritorious invitation to look backwards: precisely because the past, as such, is unrepeatable. Together with the sounds of the late-Romantic orchestra, his symphonic music accepts the joyful invitation to make music - to enjoy music and its sounds, the images it is capable of evoking and the sensations and emotions that it succeeds in arousing: to live all this positively within an experience of today. Because, as we can see, Trasimeni's music does not have just Dvorak, Vaughan-Williams, Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov before it as models of classical perfection, elegance and effectiveness in orchestral writing: it resembles above all (in terms of inspiration and the ability to evoke images and colours) that most current and truly innovative experience of film music which is the only real medium through which the twentieth century has been able to preserve and develop that classical musical handicraft that the avantgarde has repudiated and for this reason irremediably forgotten. There is, therefore, in Trasimeni's music a synthesis of the greatest traditional orchestrators' achievements and their application within the confines of a present- day poetics that clearly emerges in the phrasing of the melodies and the dense tangle of the harmonies. In Trasimeni's music, therefore, there is, quite simply, music. There are no oblique messages, no subliminal or rationalistic contents to read between the lines. One listens to sounds and the sounds are judged on their capacity to evoke, suggest and move: just as it is and has always been for true music.

 

 

Francesco Zimei

Whilst on the one hand the era of the avantgarde is in rapid decline, there is, on the other, an increasing number of musicians who, without hesitation, are returning to using tonality: either in order to re-establish a sense of musical structure and form on the basis of a language that everyone can understand or out of a rediscovered taste for communication or, on a last analysis, in order to revivify the aim of the musical avant-garde that, from the beginning of the twentieth-century, has sought to define forms and melodic and harmonic structures through sounds and tone-colour. So much so that if the roads pursued by avant-garde experimentalism have been numerous, those explored today in a recovery of tonal grammar are even more numerous: everything is permitted and every prejudice has been banished. Stefano Trasimeni's piano repertoire fits most legitimately into this new trend in contemporary musical aesthetics precisely by virtue of its formal reference to the vast late-Romantic repertoire. The reference to traditional forms and, still more, to certain features that are typical of Scriabin's writing is not a pretext but a declaration of love for a clear and explicit kind of art that is experienced without concealing ambiguities and intellectualising filters. What is more, it is a reference that is respectful and at the same time creative in which, whilst the apparently more traditional musical subject is being woven (in the punctuation of the cadenzas and the always appropriate use of the piano's idiomatic formulary, for example), sounds, colours and harmonic matchings of today (unequivocally of our era and, therefore, new) are introduced amongst the staves. Once again, however, this is done with spontaneity, without indulgent leanings towards artfully experimentalist attitudes and with the conviction that the value of art can and must lie solely in the honesty of the will to communicate: in other words, in the will to communicate with others and therefore (an essential presupposition) with oneself.

 

Fabrizio Gatta
(in the broadcast “Il Quadrato Magico ...itinerari scelti nella musica d’arte”)

Stefano Trasimeni's Study Op. 26 no.1 (as interpreted by the pianist Adriano Pupillo) is an early work but it nevertheless fits very well into the most recent aesthetic trends. This brief piano piece came into being in 1970 when the fourteen-year-old piano student Trasimeni entrusted his first compositional experience to his instrument. It is certainly a most pleasing and captivating piece that reveals a complete and well-defined musical identity rich in interesting and promising ideas that will find their confirmation in subsequent works.

 

Dimitar Zenghinov

A total artist who possesses a great musical sensitivity; gifted with an extraordinary sense of rhythm and a rare melodic sensitivity, he succeeds in making the most of phrasing without excessive emphasis. The analytical clarity of his executions (arising from his capacity to express dynamic tensions and colouring of timbre in an organic manner) is the fruit of a continual search for the interpretative identity of every individual work.

 

Flavio Pescosolido

I personally believe that Stefano Trasimeni's musical artistry (both as an orchestra conductor and as a composer and musicologist) may be traced back to a natural predisposition he has for understanding and synthesis. Gifts which, in the field of conducting, undoubtedly lead him to get the best out of a performer and therefore of the whole orchestra by understanding the objective difficulties of the instrumental writing and thereby helping the frequently fragile psychology of the assembled orchestra. In other words, human and musical sensitivity fuse in Stefano Trasimeni to form a rare concentration that rightly leads to his receiving prestigious appointments from important and well-recognised ensembles at an international level.

 

Milen Natchev

A musical personality of remarkable artistic substance with a conscious and personal musical identity capable of marrying the peculiar identity of an orchestra with the expressive requirements of the work to be interpreted. He never yields to the temptation of simplifying compromises but, rather, determinedly pursues the project dictated by his personal vision of the work on which he is working. His interpretations (those of the romantic repertoire, above all) may sometimes be debatable but they are always sharable at the level of interpretational consistency.

 

Aldo Limardo

Gifted with an elegant and effective gestural expressiveness, he succeeds in impressing on the orchestra an awareness of its own abilities, always drawing the maximum expression and tone-colour out of it. His attentive and rigorous interpretational dimension succeeds in endowing his conducting with the organic and balanced nature of a formal scheme based on a correct classification of stylistic and historical traditions.

 

Stefania Villani

In every execution, Trasimeni's lesson in interpretion distinguishes itself on account of its analytical, technical and stylistic rigour. He has a remarkable capacity to put himself in front of a score and exalt its tone-colour through acute and subtle analyses of the movements of the parts. The clarity of his reading lies precisely in his capacity to pick out with lucidity the right dynamics from amongst the orchestral amalgam.