Quartetto Prometeo

In the concert by the Quartetto Prometeo, Silver Lion at the 2012 Biennale Musica, the New and the Ancient intersect in different ways. In Francesco Antonioni’s Second String Quartet “Surfarara,” performed for the first time in Italy after its debut at London’s Wigmore Hall, the Ancient takes the form of a Sicilian song of sulfur miners collected by Alan Lomax. Antonioni elaborates on it, allowing it to distinctly emerge from the polyphonic texture, engaging in a distant dialogue with the Sicilian singer and with the “pain of memories” that permeates his words. In Bartók’s Quartet No. 4, on the other hand, the ancient manifests itself in the exaggerated symmetries of its formal architectures.