Accademia Bizantina: Everything You Can’t Write

Music’s power to express the inexpressible lies at the heart of Accademia Bizantina’s playlist. Renaissance and medieval music rubs shoulders with Baroque jewels and daring 20th-century modernism that span the range of emotions. “There are things that even the composers themselves cannot put down on paper,” says Ottavio Dantone, Accademia Bizantina’s director of music. “One can write the notes, the tempo indications, the rhythm, the dynamics, the articulations and much more, but the deeper meaning and emotion lies hidden in the semantic codes and, most importantly, in the heart.” The second movement “Allegro” from Handel’s Concerto Grosso Op. 4 No. 12 is a piece that the ensemble’s concertmaster Alessandro Tampieri finds exhilarating. “It expresses an impressive power and persuasiveness,” he says. “When I was a child I listened to it hundreds of times, dreaming of one day being able to play it. And here I am!” Vivaldi conjures seductive images of Venice while the Accademia finds drama and passion in Haydn, whose music edges the ensemble away from the Baroque and towards the Classical style of the mid 18th century. “Coming from a Baroque aesthetic allows us to place all the aesthetic and technical changes in the ‘new’ music of the Classical period into perspective,” says Tampieri. Choral music from the medieval period in an exquisitely raw performance by Ensemble Organum casts us into a mysterious ancient world. And in the next track, we’re immersed in the heady, perfumed world of Schreker’s Chamber Symphony, composed 500 years later. The feelings that this juxtaposition, and the music itself, produces are indescribable—everything you can’t write, in fact.