Ada Gentile

Ada Gentile (1947, Italy) received her piano and composition diplomas in 1972 and 1974 at S. Cecilia Conservatory in Rome. In 1975-76 she followed an advanced course held by Goffredo Petrassi at the Accademia di S. Cecilia. She has won several international composition competitions (Gaudeamus 1982, I.S.C.M. Budapest 1986, I.S.C.M. Essen 1995). Her works have been performed in Europe, the U.S.A, Canada, China, Japan, Australia and South America in prestigious musical centres such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Metropolitan and Carnegie Hall in New York, Teatro Real in Madrid, Mozarteum in Salzburg, Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, Accademia Nazionale di S.Cecilia in Rome, the F. Liszt Academy in Budapest, the Central Conservatory of Beijing (China), the Krakow Music Academy, the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, the Sejong Center of Seoul, „La Fenice” theater in Venice among others. She has been invited to the most important festivals of contemporary music and has received several commissions, including from the Radio Orchestras of Rome, Naples and Milano, from the National Academy of S. Cecilia, from the French Ministry of Culture, and the 4th Münchener Biennale. Her works (about 100, for soloists, chamber group, orchestra and theater) have been published mostly by RICORDI, RAITRADE and SCONFINARTE and recorded by RICORDI, EDT, NICCOLO’, UNMUS (Canada) and TIRRENO (Suisse). Since 1978, she has been Art Director of the contemporary music Festival Nuovi Spazi Musicali; from 1993 until 1997 she was on the board of the Venice Biennale and, from August 1996 until December 1999, Art Director of the lyric theater V. Basso in Ascoli Piceno. One of her most important works, Cantata per la pace (for large orchestra, choir and reciter), commissioned by the Vatican, was premiered with great success in Rome on 30th December 2000 to close the series Concerts for the Great Jubilee and repeated in Brasilia, St. Petersburg , Seoul, Beijing, Taipei, New York, Rostov, Kiev and Ascoli Piceno. Since 2013 she no longer lives in Rome but in Ascoli Piceno, a nice town devoted to the arts in central Italy.

Kao sećanje (Like a Memory) for piano, violin, and clarinet, was written in 2014 and published by Sconforte. Like other recent pieces by Despić, it was inspired by a brilliant and peculiar text. The piano’s mournful, heavy, icy pedal sound, erecting a sound wall riveted with small cracks, the violin’s extremely brief and rough introjections, which break the work’s flow with explosive power, and the prolonged, gentle, and distant sounds of the clarinet constitute three different sonic planes, related by their shared quest for an idea that remains confined to memory. It is a piece that offers the magic of pure sound.