Davide Costagliola
Piazza Navona, non solo befana

Sunday closing the Christmas holidays, a Piazza Navona crowded with stalls and tourists, the splendid sacristy of Borromini at Santa Agnese in Agone, the right ingredients for a concert, that of the Neapolitan pianist Davide Costagliola, who dedicated the program to Grieg and Brahms. Yet something didn't work. Let's overlook "small things" like errors and glaring omissions in the program notes and acoustics that ultimately proved unsuitable for a piano concert; what was really missing was the audience. The hall was almost full, sure, but that surreal and caricatured representation of the audience. Because is it really an audience that, unable to perceive emotions, squirms restlessly on the chair, noisily unwraps candies, or is totally passive, not to say asleep, that sparingly applauds only to then let it die out without warmth, incapable of expressing any enthusiasm for a pianist (a fine Pianist), as if in a hurry to dive back into the sugary atmosphere of the Piazza? An exhibition of such intellectual shallowness that it really kills anyone's desire to play, yet Costagliola played, and how!
Grieg's youthful op. 7 and op. 52, with flashes of intimate melodism, always with a touch of externality and descriptiveness, perhaps because the unity and harmonious cohesion of the parts with the whole were not perceived, did not hold up to the comparison with two of Brahms's most beautiful works, after which, perhaps even more so than after Beethoven, generations of musicians had to come to terms. Born in maturity, when the dream has now become regret and there is no more time, the Rhapsodies op. 79 and especially op. 118, revealed in Costagliola the traits of a pure expressive will, without hysteria and convulsions, without exaggerations, an intensity devoid of the superfluous enriched by an enviable richness of sound planes. The ability to master the structure of Brahms's work made the thematic references perfectly perceptible, linking the first intermezzo, with its ambiguous atmosphere, to the Ballad, the cornerstone of the composition, and this to the final Intermezzo where the thematic motif resurfaces until it fades away in its obsessive and resigned winding back on three notes. A Brahms resulting from great interpretative depth. Played this way, it reminds us that music is not about externality, doing, quantity, categories known to most listeners, mere eavesdroppers... of the concert: music "is" and as such falls into the category of quality, of being, of that which escapes words, inexpressible and ineffable.

Vera Mazzotta