Alessandro Cadario

Scofield: Alessandro, you are doing quite a lot to set the direction. Not only as a conductor, but as a composer as well. How do you enjoy the composer’s job compared with when you’re on the podium leading the orchestra?

Cardario: Thank you for this question, because I have the chance to say that composition to me was a fundamental step into the conducting. Often today, the job of the conductor is not related anymore to the one of the composer. And this is a pity, in a certain way, because what we do as the conductor is the opposite of what a composer is doing. A conductor takes the score as a project and builds it now, and music is the only art, together with theater, that needs people in order to make the greatest masterpieces of the past alive now. So, Beethoven is alive today, only because there are musicians today, and conductors today that can perform this. So, the conductor has the big task to take this project on the paper, and to put it alive today, and of course, to put the maximum respect he can into performing this score.

To me, the best way to go for the conducting is to have done a serious study, and possibly as a composer. Because in this way, when you approach a score, you have the chance and the possibility to discover every detail. Because you have been on the paper writing for months. Nowadays, I can say that I’m mostly conducting, because I think it’s my best way to express my musical experiences that I have had in my life. But I was doing it in equal way until 2015-16. And in the future, who knows, I will be happy to start again to write music and bring together those two great works, that is the conductor and the composer.