Sam in therapy is a psychological rehabilitation journey focused on overcoming childhood traumas. The drama is structured as a confession that retraces the patient's childhood, causing the purity of the dreamworld to dialogue/clash with a state of mind that is corroded by fears and traumas in a disturbing and grotesque way. 
The instrumentation also includes the cuica, a friction drum of Brazilian origin traditionally used in samba. The instrument, outside of its original context, offers interesting and little explored timbral effects and colours, which are well suited to represent and imitate the nuances and modulations of the human voice. Here, out of context and estranged, he gives expression to Sam's torments.

Percussion: Elio Marchesini 

Painting: Childhood Nightmares by Lin HuiJing

Sam in therapy for solo percussion (2023)

I was asked a challenging task: to compose a short piece that went through five different emotional states or feelings. Panta rhei is an ancient Greek concept, generally attributed to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. It means "everything flows", expressing that everything in the world and in the human being is constantly changing. I musically tried to elaborate and develop the same idea transmuting it into the emotional sphere, always fading one sentiment into another. Emotions flow like a river current.

Avanti! kamariorkesteri
Dir: Jukka Rantamäki

Instrumentation: flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon, 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass.

Panta Rhei for ensemble (2024)

The two miniatures are part of a cycle entitled “Kindergarten”, a collection of compositions that aims to explore and transfigure archetypes and cultural references of the world of children, transferring their complex social dynamics into the orchestra.
The first of the two songs is inspired by "Ring a Ring o' Roses", a nursery rhyme, folk song, and playground game that we find adapted into several languages around the world. A group of children forms a ring, chant an obsessive singsong, dances in a circle around one person, and then stoops or curtsies on the final line. The slowest child to perform this action may face a penalty or become the "rosie" (literally: rose tree, from the French rosier), taking their place in the center of the ring. 
The second piece ironically explores the social dynamics of disobedience and the call to order, simulating an out-of-control cross-country race.

1) Ring a ring o' roses
2) (Anarchist) cross-country race

Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Alternative Orchestra, Daniele Rosina (live performance)

Two Children's Games For A Weird Ensemble (2022)

Kordax (or Cordax) has been a satirical and comic dance of ancient Greek comedy, sometimes also described as licentious, obscene and provocative. The word sounds also pretty similar to the term chorda (Latin) or khordé (Greek), which leads us into the world of musical instruments (e.g., quatuor à cordes). Therefore the composition is a satirical ballet conceived for string quartet, but also something more. The conventional separation of the triad musicians-dancers-audience is here dropped, leading the performers to theatrically merge the different roles. For example, are the players allowed to animatedly praise themselves after showcasing an insane virtuosity? 

The work has been conceived for and dedicated to the JACK Quartet.


Kordax, an eccentric ballet for string quartet (2024)

Daniele Di Virgilio - Clavigo, chamber opera (act 4). 
Recording of the première, 7 December 2024, Budapest Music Center.
Márta Murányi (Sopran), Anna Molnár (Mezzosopran), Georgi Sztojanov (Tenor), Zsombor Cserményi (Bariton)
Classicus Quartet: Eszter Kökény (Violine), Alíz Gál-Szabó (Violine), Péter Tornyai (Viola), Tamás Zétényi (Violoncello)

The chamber opera Clavigo is a project promoted by the Péter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation and supported by Kunststiftung NRW and Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, to celebrate the 275th anniversary of the birth of J.W. Goethe and the 250th anniversary of the publication of his play. 
The four acts of the drama were set to music by four different composers: Elias Frisk (1st act), Aurélie Ferrière (2nd act), Daniel Lee Chappell (3rd act) and Daniele Di Virgilio (4th act). 

(PLOT) Goethe’s play is a tale of competing ambition and love. Clavigo is an up-and-coming Spanish writer. In his younger and poorer days, he fell in love with and became engaged to the charming but sickly Marie. However, when his star started to rise, his friends convinced him that Marie would hold his career back. At best, she’d be a distraction; at worst, she’d prevent an advantageous marriage. So he broke the engagement. Marie’s brother Beaumarchais (yes, the French playwright—this is loosely based on real events) has come to Spain to confront Clavigo. He exorts a (potentially career-killing) written confession of wrongdoing from Clavigo but promises not to have it published until Clavigo can ask Marie for pardon and renew their engagement. Clavigo successfully does this. Marie, upon hearing of this, dies. Clavigo (who has not heard the news) stumbles upon her funeral procession and is distraught. Beaumarchais fatally stabs Clavigo, and Clavigo accepts his death as atonement for his crime (@Ilana Walder-Biesanz).

Clavigo, chamber opera (2024)

The art of persuasion has always fascinated me, especially the skill and originality of street vendors, who with extravagant gestures and speeches try to convince you to buy their products or services. In Italy, several figures have become iconic for their bizarreness and madness, so much so that they have become myths of popular folklore. By now, many of these figures have almost disappeared in our hyper-technological/globalized world, but they still evoke lively and playful childhood memories. Characters such as l’arrotino (the knife grinder), il coccobello (the coconut seller on the beach) or the histrionic door-to-door greengrocer were able to transform an economic transaction into a real theatrical performance, and it is precisely to these three icons that I wanted to pay homage in Oikonomia (from the Greek , “economy”). 
The knife grinder passed through the streets with his van, broadcasting a tape from the loudspeakers that has now become a cult object. After introducing himself eloquently (“Donne! È arrivato l'arrotino”/“Ladies! The knife grinder has come!”), he offered a bizarre combination of services: knife sharpening, umbrella and gas stove repair.
The greengrocers who stop at street corners prefer instead a live “performance”, improvising to the speakers a flurry of lists of vegetables, numbers, polite phrases, shouts and much more that to my ears sounded like a brilliant musical comedy. The greengrocer's text comes from a recording I recently made in Monopoli, a small town in Puglia (Apulia).
Finally the coconut seller, a character worthy of the commedia dell'arte, an entertainer on Italian beaches. A storyteller, poet, modern minstrel, he performed with playful rhyming phrases to convince you of the sensational qualities of coconuts (aphrodisiacs, fertility, etc.), sometimes displaying a scurrilous and bawdy language enriched by sexual allusions. In the piece I have collected some of the most popular ones.
This lively carousel led me to give a caricatural-parodic character to the composition, but the idea of the piece comes from a deeper critical thought which is revealed in the finale: the reflection about the dehumanization of the economy in today's society. When it comes to goods and services transactions, most of the richness, the complexity and even poetry that once characterized exchange relationships seem to be all but lost in a world predominantly oriented towards web marketing. At the end of the piece, after an open improvisation that retraces and merges the previous three parts, all the lively and picturesque vibes spread by the three characters faded into a dystopic ritualistic atmosphere. Here a sort of profane Communion starts, accompanied by the solo vibraphone like a church organ: the singer is now a delivery person, a courier, a sort of celebrant, delivering hastily parcels to the musicians; they get the object, one by one, only a dry exchange of customary words. The last disciple is the percussionist, who has to stop playing. He takes the parcel, says “amen”, and leaves.


Oikonomia for soprano, violin, double bass, piano and percussion (2024)

The composition is inspired by the work of Sappho of Lesbos, a poetess of ancient Greece, and in particular by her most fragmentary poems. The charm of the incomplete allows us to navigate with our imagination, to imagine meanings and connections that the surviving verses can in some cases subtly suggest, but which often remain shrouded in enigma. The idea of “completing” some of these fragments is the basis of the composition and influences its structure. In fact, the five short pieces that build this work fill, so to speak, the gaps in the lost verses, which are integrated by the performer with the recitation or intonation of the surviving ones, suggesting the enigma that the music has begun to reveal. The pieces range between the different nuances that eros embodies in the Sapphic work, from the most delicate to the most Dionysian. The entire work is unitary and cyclical, as the last piece of the collection integrates, corrodes and distorts some musical fragments and episodes of the previous pieces, permeating them with the feeling of transience and nostalgia that appears in the last verse of Sappho.

Performer: Pietro Elia Barcelona

Erotika (Sappho-Fragmente) for double bass (2024)

Daniele Di Virgilio is an Italian Berlin-based composer and perpetual researcher. Conceiving composition as a multi-disciplinary and social-oriented expression, his music is inspired by a theatrical imagination and by the interest in psychoanalysis.

Daniele Di Virgilio

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