Francesca Dego
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From Bach to Bacewicz, via Paganini - a musical journey through the history of the violin

Francesca Dego is one of the most acclaimed violinists on the international scene. Raised among books and music, daughter of the writer and poet Giuliano Dego and herself the author of the book “Tra le note. Classical: 24 keys to interpretation” (Mondadori 2019), she is the ideal cast to provide the musical frame during the handover ceremony.
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    Representative of the cultural tradition of Italy as the homeland of the violin, Francesca Dego sees interpreting musical pieces as a work of reading. “For me the literary and musical worlds are complementary and have always influenced each other profoundly,” says Francesca Dego. “It would be impossible to execute a piece of music without reading those authors who were contemporaries of the composer, who lived in the same period and shared the same poetry.”

    Continuing the idea of reading pieces of music, Dego prepared for her interlude in Frankfurt a small journey through the history of the solo violin repertoire, from Johann Sebastian Bach – the first author to represent the Western tradition – up to Grażyna Bacewicz, one of the rare women composers, contemporary of the 20th century.

    To link the two compositions, a piece by Nicolo Paganini, Capriccio n. 16, which was the inspiration for Grażyna Bacewicz to compose her own capriccio in homage to Paganini.

    Back to the roots, Francesca Dego concludes with the Sarabande in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, which, like the other two pieces, she interprets on a violin by Francesco Ruggeri from 1697 - another representative of the cultural roots and the great Italian violon making tradition.

    Meeting Francesca Dego, who tells us why she chose Capriccio n. 16 by Paganini and the 'Capricco Polacco' by Grażyna Bacewicz:

    "The solo violin repertoire is notoriously complex and virtuosic for the instrument. Over the centuries the greatest virtuosos and composers have used this medium to demonstrate their tightrope walking skills, starting with Paganini, king of violinists and composer to whom I have always been particularly attached, having recorded his iconic 24 caprices as a twenty-year-old for Deutsche Grammophon. For this performance I chose capriccio n.16, a short and very fast piece, a barrage of notes bordering on the performable, written in the early 19th century. Alongside Paganini, I wanted to give voice to a great virtuoso, one of the few women to have had a career in the field of classical music on a historical level both as a performer and composer, the Polish Grazyna Bacewicz. The piece “Capriccio Polacco” was composed in 1949, 150 years later than Paganini but demonstrates how Paganini dictated the language and was the inspiration for dozens of subsequent composers."

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