Hornkonzert (2021)
(for French Horn and orchestra)

The premiere of the Horn Concerto scheduled for 2020 stemmed from a proposal by the Emilia Romagna Festival in collaboration with the Ljubljana Festival and the Toscanini Orchestra. Due to the advent of the pandemic, among other reasons, the piece was initially postponed and ultimately canceled, as these festivals had to largely reboot and modify their projects. However, I began conversations with soloist Radovan Vlatkovic to whom I dedicated the piece, and from the very beginning, I intended to develop an approach from three different perspectives, each per movement, for the horn concerto.

The first movement, derived from a medieval cantus firmus by Hildegard von Bingen and a modulating harmonic spectrum, proposes an interplay between the partially suggested medieval melos element and a kind of atomization of the orchestra's material. It takes part of a more general interest of mine on musical units derived from the "word" and its parts as root and desinence.

The development of the piece expands both instances gradually until a point of independence and mutual separation.

 The second movement, inspired by the enunciation style of Japanese Noh theater, introduces the horn in the lower register, whose way of expressing itself extends across the entire orchestra. This initial low register gradually ascends, progressively developing in terms of expression to a climax, before returning to a similar, recontextualised situation as the beginning.

 The third movement continues the process of sonic atomization proposed in the first movement, accelerating and alternating it with melodic figures of various lengths played by the Soloist. These accelerations reach a maximum climax and a point of no return with which the piece concludes.