Track: The Betrayed Melody (after Robert Burns) by Francesco Leineri
Francesco Leineri is a composer and performer graduated from the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Rome under the guidance of Matteo D’Amico. At the same time, he enhanced his training as a conductor under the direction of Gianluigi Zampieri and Francesco Lanzillotta and attended various workshop (Mark Andre, Silvia Colasanti, Pawel Mykyetin, Darius Przybylski, Franco Piersanti).
His repertoire is focused on the relationship between music and words in opera, theatre and visual arts on a broader range: his style is aimed at conveying a story. His catalogue includes soundtracks for theatre, video, contemporary art installations, arrangements and transcriptions. He also stars as a musician and live performer, inclined to teamwork and multidisciplinary collaborations, working with and also conducting various ensembles in his productions. At the moment he is represented by PianoB Agency, his works are published by Ermes404 editions.
His works have been staged in Italy (RomaEuropa Festival 2021; IUC – Concerti alla Sapienza; Auditorium Parco della musica di Roma; Accademia Filarmonica Romana; PIF 2014, Castelfidardo; GNAM Roma; MUST Milano), France (Theatre de Verre, Paris), Germany (UWE – der festival 2016, Munich), Czech Republic (Setkani-Encounter 2016, Brno), Switzerland (“Appunti di viaggio” 2010, Teatro La Darsena, Lugano), California (Spreckels Theatre, San Diego Fringe Festival 2015), Mexico (Estacion Teatro, Tijuana), India (ITFOK 2017, Thrissur) and Ecuador (Encuentro de los Andes 2013, Riobamba).
About the piece: This work is part of a series I started in 2017 with “Tre riflessioni armoniche in miniatura” for percussions. This series works originate from a certain pre-existing musical idea gathered from the history of music, which I have each time reinvented with a compositive method that takes as its starting point the most superficial techniques of arrangement to achieve a systematic sabotage of the relevant episode.
Merging Musical Roots: The betrayal of Robert Burns’ melody (“Green grow the rashes”) and of the peculiarly Italian attention to singing – the element I chose from my country’s musical background, requested by JKL duo and grafted onto Burns’ music – develops over two layers: the first explores the relationship between voice and accompaniment (as monodic and polyphonic instrument); the second de-structures the melody itself, clothing it in different garments through superpositions of harmonies, rhythmical changes and additions of notes, to the point of rendering it completely invisible by the end of the piece.
The International Poet 