Doctor Faustus

In 1982 I did a 25 concerts duo tour with Albert in the former DDR (East Germany); we found such a great common ground in music that the year after I invited him to perform as soloist with the A.C. Mitteleuropa Orchestra.

Mitteleuropa Orchestra was a project commissioned in 1979 by the City Cultural Affairs department in Bologna. The formation was flexible and variable, depending on the performance requirements, but it always retained its essential characteristics thanks to a fixed nucleus of musicians. The orchestra's physiognomy distanced it from the "classical" jazz big bands and aligned it more with contemporary chamber music formations. Using my experience of music making in small combinations, with strong tone-color characteristics, I achieved a fusion of diverse cultures (western classical, oriental and Afro-American) in a rigorously controlled musical structure, integrating written orchestral passages with aleatoric sections, creating ample space in which soloists could improvise in "controlled" situations. Within the orchestra the various personalities of the artists, interacted to create a particular stylistic mix which became the hallmark oft this ensemble.

Mitteleuropa gave its debut concert in Bologna in the summer of 1980, and in December of that same year recorded Mitteleuropa Live, an album taken from live recordings at the Testoni Theater in Bologna (a benefit concert for victims of the Irpinia earthquake). First four tracks on this CD document Bologna performance. Here you can hear the four extended original compositions. They use pulsating thematic inventions, collective multiphonics, long solo cadences, and improvised chamber music interludes over fixed frameworks; in trio, quartet and quintet, and in dialogues between percussion and soloists. Bologna performance was a first of many other concerts and recordings to come of the material written and conducted by me.

Last three tracks on this CD present selections from live performances at Modena (1981), Alassio (1982) and Ravenna (1983) Festivals. The Italian Radio arid Television ("RAI") invited the orchestra to Rome to record the ensemble's repertoire live. In 1983, I conducted Mitteleuropa at the international festival "Ravenna Jazz" in a performance of Doctor Faustus, a suite which has remained unpublished for 25 years, written in honor of trombonist-Albert Mangellsdorf, who was a soloist with the orchestra for the performance. Here finally you have the chance to listen to some music from that historical night.

Mitteleuropa Orchestra was born from my interest in expanding my composing experiences: so I got together a group of talented young musicians together with several big-name soloists for an orchestral project that I decided to call Mitteleuropa in homage to what for me was, at that time, the ideal center of my own cultural background.

From that point on the Orchestra became an established group and for five years, participated in the major international festivals and recorded a LP featuring my works composed specifically for the group. During those years a number of important soloists, both European and American, from a wide variety of musical backgrounds were guests of the Orchestra. Among many others, they included Radu Malfatti and Albert Mangelsdorf (whom you can hear on tracks #6 and #7), Mark Dresser, Martyn Mayes, Paolo Fresu and others, not to mention the great steady soloists, core of the orchestra.