This month we celebrate Niccolo Castiglioni, as he was born in July 1932. Castiglioni was an Italian pianist and composer. Between 1958 and 1966 he taught at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, the hot spot of contemporary music.
We came across with the interesting music of Niccolo Castiglioni in 2018, as we were taking part in a wonderful workshop called Workshop Research-led Performance: Flute and Guitar in Twentieth Century Music. There we had the opportunity to work on the music of Castiglioni with musicologists such as Gianmario Borio, Francisco Rocca among others. Moreover, we focused on the performance of this music with Elena Casoli, Federica Lotti, Martin Falenbock and Florindo Baldissera.
His composition, Sic was written in 1992. It is written for guitar and 3 flutes, as Polychronis has to play also the piccolo and the alto flute. The pieces has 5 movements, all very different in character and filled with interesting elements such as twelve-tone technique, dialogues and imitations between the flute and the guitar.
You can find our interpretation of Sic here: