Concert "An American in Paris"
On Tuesday, October 28th, Cuneo Conservatory professors Silvia Cucchi, Paolo Franciscone, Stefano Profeta, and Sandro Marrocu will present a lecture-concert. The evening closes the 2025 Artistic Season and is free to attend; reservations are recommended.
Nearly a hundred years after the first performances of Rhapsody in Blue and the Piano Concerto in F, the Ghedini Conservatory presents "An American in Paris – George Gershwin and the French World: Black and White Dialogues between European Classical Tradition and Jazz," a lecture-concert recounting the revolutionary encounter between two seemingly distant musical worlds. Speakers include Cuneo Conservatory professors Silvia Cucchi, Paolo Franciscone, Stefano Profeta, and Sandro Marrocu. The event, which begins at 8:30 pm in the Sala San Giovanni in Cuneo (Via Roma 4), celebrates one of the most significant moments in twentieth-century musical history and is the final event of the Ghedini Conservatory's 2025 Artistic Season. Attendance is free, but reservations are recommended, starting Tuesday, October 21, at www.conservatoriocuneo.it.
Original arrangements of some of Gershwin's most famous themes, straddling the boundary between academic classical language and jazz-inspired improvisation, will be presented, including some celebrated pieces by other composers, performed by Silvia Cucchi on piano, Paolo Franciscone on drums, and Stefano Profeta on double bass, following the typical codes of a jazz trio. Live musical performances will be interspersed with historical narrations, stories, and piano examples by Sandro Marrocu. The four instructors offer a genuine exploration of what might be described as a sort of borderline between classical musical tradition and popular innovation, a territory in which Gershwin navigated with unique brilliance.
Between 1924 and 1928, the American experienced a pivotal moment in his career and in the history of twentieth-century music: Rhapsody in Blue, composed in 1924, and the Concerto in F Major, premiered on December 3, 1925, marked the beginning of an unprecedented dialogue between the classical European musical tradition and the language of jazz. This dialogue culminated in December 1928 with the premiere of the symphonic poem An American in Paris, the fruit of a trip to Europe undertaken by Gershwin specifically to closely study composers he admired, chief among them the Frenchman Maurice Ravel. At a time when jazz was perceived mostly as an evocative, exotic stimulus, Ravel himself wrote that from the complexity of that language, so closely connected to the phylogeny of American society and its European roots, would one day emerge a truly "authentically American artistic idiom": a truly prophetic vision.
Remembering the cultural climate of that period in a Conservatory is a deliberate choice for educational and informative purposes: the institution that has historically preserved and passed down the classical European musical tradition becomes, in a constant process of renewal and adaptation to the reality of the contemporary musical landscape, an ideal space to reflect on how that same tradition has been able to dialogue, open up, and transform itself, encountering and developing new musical expressions.
