Enrico Correggia was born in 1933 in La Spezia. He studied piano and conducting when still very young and reached maturity just after the Second World War, during a period of exhaustion and intellectual and artistic radicalness. He was struck by Penderecki, Lutoslawski and Ligeti’s music and later on by Scelsi’s and Xenakis’. Enrico Correggia has always combined composition with teaching —until recently at the Turin Conservatoire— and conducting —since 1977 he has traveled around the world with the ensemble Antidogma Musica.
His first pieces obeyed the structural tendency; he then developed a musical language combining rigor and fantasy. Rigor leads him to first conceive a strict formal structure, often based on the golden section: having thus divided the macroscopic divisions in time, he proceeds to divide the parts —following the same process— in more and more brief and localized manner.
Then “fantasy inhabits this ghost-like world” tank to tunefulness (“however, beware, this concern —a recent one by the way— is on no account taken over from the past”) and to unchecked expressiveness. Enrico Correggia is “tired of heteroclite instrumental groups” and has returned to more traditional ensembles.
The music Correggia composes today is made of successions of overlappings, glissandi and violent emergences. It faithfully reflects a personality craving for motley and variety.
(Frank LANGLOIS, Salabert Editions, 1994)