LA GIOVANE SCUOLA: PROTAGONISTS & ANTAGONISTS

FIFTH EPISODE Ildebrando Pizzetti: Assassinio nella Cattedrale

ENRICO REGGIANI Enrico Reggiani is full professor of English literature in the Faculty of Linguistic Sciences and Foreign Literatures, at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore – Milano. He has published widely on William Butler Yeats and other Irish writers, on writers of Catholic origin, culture and background (especially the English and Irish ones from 1789 to 1918), and on interdisciplinary relationships between literature and economy. He also teaches musical languages in a historical perspective thanks to his specific advanced competence and appreciated research in the musicological field. After graduating in piano in 1980, he taught music education at Secondary School for Singers and Dancers of Teatro alla Scala, and music analysis at the Civica Scuola di Musica “Claudio Abbado”, . After being a member of the scientific committee at the musico-literary festival Le Corde dell’Anima (Cremona, 2010-2014), since 2011 he has been the director of the Studium Musicale di Ateneo “Note d’InChiostro”, at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore – Milano. He is a regular music lecturer at “Iniziative Culturali” of “laVerdi – Orchestra Sinfonica e Coro Sinfonico di Milano ” and at Casa della Cultura (Milan). He is a member of the association Il Saggiatore Musicale and of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). At present, the interdisciplinary relationships and bidirectional crossings between literature and music are his main research area. He has recently been defined as a scholar “with a high profile in the relevant field”. He is completing a monograph on A tone-deaf poet in the Land of Song. Musico-literary soundscapes in W. B. Yeats and a “I prefer Shakespeare to Jean Paul”: a post-conference(s) essay on Schumann’s compositional reception of the Bard.

DONATO DI GIOIA Thanks to the versatility of his voice Donato Di Gioia has played more than forty roles at some of the major Italian and foreign operatic institutions, including Teatro Regio (Turin), Teatro Carlo Felice (Genova), Arena di Verona, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Teatro Giuseppe Verdi (Trieste), Teatro dell’Opera (), Puccini Opera Festival (Tuscany), Ravenna Festival, the Teatro dell’Opera (Ferrara), Ljubljana Opera, Teatro Real (Madrid), Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Bayreuth Opernhaus, Krakow Opera (Poland), Massy Opéra (Paris), Varna

Opera House (Bulgaria), Tokyo Bunkaikan, Nagasaki Opera, Osaka Opera, Place Des Arts (Montréal). He performed as a soloist with tenor José Carreras in the world première of “Beatification of Padre Pio”, by Sergio Rendine, in Sala Nervi (Vatican City State). He has won some important competitions, such as the International Competition “Gaspare Spontini” (first prize).

FRANCESCO MELANI Francesco Melani debuted as a soloist in 2007. His career has continued as a piano player and as a composer and arranger for chamber music ensembles. He performed in some of the most prestigious halls of (), such as Auditorium del Carmine, Teatro Regio and Casa della Musica, and at some renowned national festival, such as Bolgheri Melody, Festival Verdi, Parma Frontiere, Jazz Festival and Bologna Festival. Here he presented for the first time a piece for orchestra and spoken words “Welcome to Americazz…” and “Attent-age”. He performed as an accompanist at Conservatorio di Parma. In 2014, as a principal in the Orchestra of Conservatorio di Parma, he took part in featuring Luciano Berio’s “Rendering” and in a project meant to revive the opera “Pier Luigi Farnese”, by Arrigo Boito and Costantino Palumbo; within the Contemporary Music Ensemble of Conservatorio di Parma, conducted by Danilo Grassi, he contributed to the production of “Elio è Frankenstein”, “Frank Zappa, the yellow shark” and a monograph about the composer Paolo Castaldi. In 2015 he was awarded a scholarship by Chiesi Farmaceutici for the creation of a soundtrack for a commercial of the company. His composition titled “Encore”, for accordion and strings, was selected and executed for “PIF 2016”. In 2017 he won the first prize at Piove di Sacco Piano Contest and Premio Crescendo in . His composition “Psalm 122” has recently been broadcasted by the Italian national TV channel RAI 2. Under Maestro M. Bellocchio he is attending a piano master degree on the compositions by György Ligeti, and he collaborates on several projects with the Conservatorio di Parma.