Lino Liviabella

Within twentieth-century Italian music runs a less immediately visible current, far removed both from melodrama and from the most radical avant-gardes. It is a current shaped by lyrical tension, harmonic colour and inward exploration. Lino Liviabella belongs profoundly to this world. A pupil of Ottorino Respighi, Liviabella was a composer, pianist and teacher who developed a highly personal language, preserving a bond with tradition while embracing a profound expressive restlessness. His music brings together formal clarity, harmonic richness and a singing quality that never loses touch with the natural rhythm of human breath. The Due espressioni liriche already reveal an intense and fluid style, traversed by constantly shifting emotional chiaroscuro. In the Quartet in F minor, the musical argument broadens further: the tension deepens, the sound grows darker and more complex, and the writing takes on a density that continually drives the language towards new expressive possibilities. Alongside these works, Ottorino Respighi’s Antiche arie e danze seem to contemplate the past through a filtered, suspended light. The memory of early music is not reconstructed, but transformed into atmosphere, colour and poetic distance. With Maurice Ravel, the programme opens onto a different vision of modernity. In the Quartet in F major, rhythm grows taut, colour becomes structure, and form acquires an almost luminous precision. The writing retains its transparency and elegance, yet beneath the surface there is always a subtle, shifting and restless tension.

Bringing this musical journey to life is the Lino Liviabella Quartet, an ensemble that combines concert performance with sustained research into the Italian composer’s work. In doing so, it restores to the present a voice whose originality and relevance remain striking. The concert takes place in the Church of Santo Stefano in Tesserete, a building of Romanesque origin, transformed over the centuries and overlooking the Denti della Vecchia. It is an intimate and contemplative setting, where history, landscape and listening seem naturally to converge.

BIOGRAPHY

Lino Liviabella Quartet
The Lino Liviabella Quartet is a string ensemble that combines concert performance with research into twentieth-century Italian music, with particular emphasis on the work of Lino Liviabella. Its repertoire places the composer’s music in dialogue with major works of the European twentieth century, creating programmes in which memory, tradition and modernity meet through the medium of the string quartet.