Music to Dream: Cantabiles

Karl-Heinz Halder, trumpet
Jürgen Benkö, organ

Enrico Pasini has referred to himself as an unusual composer. The favorite pupil of Armando Renzi (1915–1985) acquired from his teacher the courage for creativity and for a very personal kind of music making. Although linked to the church as an organist, he did not let himself be induced to adopt an academic and clerical compositional style order to ultimately “write pieces such as already exist in great numbers” (Pasini). His goal was rather to open a new path for the organ, to allow it to tell of “romance, love, and everything beautiful” that surrounds human beings. The composer ascribes his success with his „Cantabili“ to the fact that, as an attentive observer of the world, he attempts to clearly express that which is profoundly human; in a word, that the pieces tell “everything from A to Z about human beings” (Pasini) and thus always remain up to date.

At the same time, he also sees himself embodied in the Cantabili more than in any other work: the composer, who likes to refer to himself as a “seller of emotions,” emphasizes that all of his life experience, feelings, and all of the joy and sorrow that belongs to each human being has flowed into this music. Every human being carries these feelings within him/herself. His task as composer merely consists of capturing these human sentiments and putting them down in musical notation. Therefore, while listening, everybody finds something that touches him/herself directly, that is a part of him/herself.