Pasatieri - and his music.

The Louisville International Airport seems unusually quiet at 4 in the afternoon: very few people walking around, some seated at the bar, everything very calm. I get my cup of coffee, sit down on a bench near the arrival gate, and wait. I am early, but so is Mr. Pasatieri’s flight, and after a couple of minutes I see a tall man approaching me with a big, friendly smile on his face. He greets me in Italian. Pasatieri has very long grey hair and in a way an imposing bearing, but his manners reveal right away a very delicate, sensitive personality, and so does his voice, and his eyes. There is a mixture of elegance and sweetness in the way he talks and relates to you. But I feel also, right away, a great passion, participation, emotional engagement in every one of his gestures and words: his Italian heritage, some would probably say. On our way back to Lexington, we cannot stop talking for a second, about opera, about Italy, about Pasatieri’s new symphony, about people, music, life. All those things that I felt right away, the second I met him, are confirmed, even reinforced. In a way Pasatieri - the man - is very much like his music: in his “Symphony”, written two years ago, specifically for the UK Symphony Orchestra, you find the tenderness and elegance of gracious pastoral rhythms and playful, dance-like woodwinds phrases in the middle section, the Allegretto grazioso in 6/8, and you may think of Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin, or maybe recall some 19th century Viennese imagery; on the other hand, you have the passionate, dark melody of the main theme, vibrantly played by the string at the beginning, then suddenly revealing an agitato character in a slightly different version… perhaps the inner turbulence of an overly sensitive soul? In the Adagio section, you can easily abandon yourself to the elegant, transparent melody in the oboe solo, floating above the warm, embracing accompaniment of the muted strings, beautiful in its pureness and still full of emotion, deeply romantic.

There is the imposing orchestration, the large use of brass and percussion, the majestic pace and spectacular conclusive gestures in the final Maestoso on one side; and the elegance of the structure, based on two main ideas, and the refinement and lightness of touch in many small details of the instrumental writing. And there are also moments where you may catch a glimpse of a lonely, introverted character beyond the notes, a solitary soul, agitated by profound passions but also in a way lost and confused in a society less and less responsive to art, to music, to poetry and beauty. It is, at least, what I glimpsed in the French horn cadenza and then in the trumpet cadenza responding to it: I see a pensive melancholy there, and a sort of disoriented feeling - I see the childish fear in Pasatieri’s eyes when, at the front desk of the hotel, he cannot find his wallet, and when it finally turns up, with an innocent smile of relief he tells me how hard it is to be well organized and take care of practical things when you are alone.

The next day, Pasatieri and I are on the radio, for a live interview, and with us is also Maestro John Nardolillo, the director of the UK Symphony, and a violinist from the orchestra. It is a long interview, from 8 to 9pm, but it feels more like a very relaxed, one-hour informal chat. Pasatieri loves to talk, and when it comes to describing his symphony, he quotes the words once used to define his music by one of its performers: it is like “drinking a glass of apricot brandy that has a piece of glass shattered in it”. All the presents find the description very appropriate, and I feel it is a good way to say something about “Symphony” in a few words. During the radio show Pasatieri talks also about the fact that he had never physically heard his creation before that day, it was only in his mind, while at UK we had been working on it for a couple of weeks, and the orchestra and everybody present in rehearsal at the very first reading of the symphony (which I happened to conduct) had experienced this music long before its own creator.

In a way it is hard for me to say something very simple and direct about this piece: I have had the score in my hands for a month, I have studied it in detail, I have worked on it with the orchestra, have heard it many times in rehearsal and conducted three performances of it in the last couple of days. Funnily enough, the only thing I cannot really talk about is the first official performance and world premiere of the piece, last Friday at the Singletary Center of Lexington with John Nardolillo at the head of the UKSO: as assistant conductor, I had backstage and managing duties during the concert and could not really enjoy the performance in the best way.

I can say that I know the symphony very well now and I especially enjoyed conducting it. And I can certainly say that I see Thomas Pasatieri in this music, at least as I have gotten to know him in these past days. Besides any technical or aesthetical evaluation of this work, “Symphony” seems to have a great quality, in that it is an immediate and honest reflection of the personality of its composer, and, even being a somewhat articulated musical structure, it keeps a spontaneous, true quality to the writing, a sort of innocent, pure expressivity that sometimes seems lost in many contemporary compositions.

Our use of the last name of a composer to indicate both his/her person and historical figure on one side, and his/her music on the other, is in a way almost a given fact of the language and its semiotic: Mozart is often described as a jolly man, at times childish and inclined to foolishness and obscenity - but also Mozart is often described as elegant, refined and at the same time profound and sublime. Well, in the case of Pasatieri I feel that we wouldn’t ever need two separate sets of opposite adjectives, but we would probably use the same or very similar words to talk about the man - and about his music.