Raffaele Grimaldi (1980). Composer, pianist, and conductor Raffaele Grimaldi was born in 1980. He graduated in piano and composition cum laude at G. Martucci Music Conservatory inSalerno (Italy) and advanced composition with top marks at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome. He has received numerous awards and important prizes in major national and international competitions. He attended master classes by Salvatore Sciarrino, Brian Ferneyhough, Ivan Fedele, Georges Aperghis, Michael Jarrell, Marco Stroppa, and Hugues Dufourt. His compositions have been performed in Europe, the US, Japan, Russia, Australia, broadcast on international radio stations, and performed by globally renowned orchestras, soloists, and ensembles. In 2008, he was selected by IRCAM (Paris) for their Course in Composition and Computer Music, also securing an artistic residence at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. He is highly interested in painting, poetry, and philosophy and is a co-founder of the blog www.nuthing.eu, where he writes about contemporary music.

Trio for violin, viola, and cello – For years, I have wanted to attempt to write for a difficult and complex ensemble, such as a string trio. In this piece, as in other pieces I have composed in the last several years, I tried to develop a more personal perception and relation with the flow of time. That is why for me, every piece is conceived as a sort of ‘conscious temporal experience’, where I try to combine various elements in a non-measured section, in stark contrast with more measured and rigid sections. During the development of the piece, sometimes every instrument is a single organism, sometimes the sound is ‘nude’; and sometimes they are fused together, in a unique inner organism, as a pulsating background, brought toward extreme sonorities through constant rhythmic pulsation. The piece lives on oppositions and contrasts, on unexpected developments, high-density amplifications and amazed rarefactions; an adventure tuning composition and knowledge – more and more experience of our perceptive dynamics.