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The concert, which will take place on Sunday, March 30, 2025, at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence, will also include Boris Papandopulo’s Little Concerto for Piccolo and Chamber String Ensemble. The Music Information Center has made the sheet music available, so it was an excellent opportunity to contact Mo. Francesco Viola and ask him a few questions. Over the past few years, Papandopulo’s Little Concerto for Piccolo and Chamber String Ensemble has become a central piece in Francesco Viola’s recitals throughout Germany, Italy, and Serbia, often performed with piano accompaniment rather than a string ensemble. In addition, this Papandopulo composition was immortalized on a CD recorded in 2023 for the Naxos label. In addition to Papandopulo’s work, the CD also includes works by Eastern European composers such as Andreas Baksa, Uroš Krek, and Frigyes Hidas, fulfilling Viola’s desire to enrich the piccolo repertoire.
The following are questions and answers…
Francesco Viola’s Musical Journey Through Europe: Discovering Papandopulo’s Little Concerto for Piccolo and Chamber String Ensemble
MIC: How did you come across Papandopulo’s Little Concerto for Piccolo and Chamber String Ensemble? Could you share the story behind discovering this particular piece and what drew you to it?
Francesco Viola: It was 2020, the pandemic had stopped us, but in my home in Germany ( where I was at the time) I was very productive with the piccolo and the idea of discovering a unknown to me repertoire for piccolo ran through my veins. It was thanks to Ana Domancic and Raphael Leone that I came to know about Papandopulo’s Concertino. After a first reading it was very clear to me that I wanted to play and record this piece of such beauty.
The improvisational character of the first movement, the melancholy and beauty of the second, the dance rhythm of the third…bewitched me.
MIC: What are your performance or concert plans? Do you plan to perform Papandopulo’s Little Concerto for Piccolo and Chamber String Ensemble anywhere else?
Francesco Viola: Lately it’s a piece that with piano reduction I perform very often in my recitals ( Germany, Italy, Serbia), I don’t exclude the possibility of playing it again with a String Ensemble.
MIC: You were a piccolo soloist of the Nationaltheater in Mannheim and now of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence. How did you decide to record a CD in Mannheim and perform a live concert in Florence?
Francesco Viola: Just as the pandemic was coming to an end and the Mannheim theater was being closed for a lengthy renovation, a recording date was set together with Naxos, which unfortunately (because of the limited space), did not allow opportunities for making a concert with the audience. A short time later, I won the audition at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, and the idea of offering this splendid Concertino to the public had not ceased. I consider myself very lucky to have the opportunity to share such a work with orchestral colleagues from two great European theaters.
MIC: How did the idea of recording the CD come about and how did you decide to record a CD with works by composers of Romanian, Hungarian, Slovenian, and Croatian origin?
Francesco Viola: Papandopulo’s concertino, joined a series of unknown and world premiere concerts creating an album with 20th- and 21st-century Eastern European composers. Krek’s concertino had strangely disappeared from the Piccoloist performance scene for quite some time, Baksa’s concerto was finally being offered for the first time in an orchestral version, and with Hidas’s concerto I had enjoyed substituting the oboe’s voice for that of the piccolo in a truly apt sonic mixture. It seemed to me the best idea to propose this instrument to the public: often categorized only and erroneously as a circus instrument.
All four composers succeeded in giving great value to this instrument, not an easy task!
MIC: Can you describe how you came up with the idea to create the trailer yourself?
Francesco Viola: With the promotional video trailer I unleashed my most hidden creativity outside of music. Together with my friends Alessandro Sinopoli and Ernesto Lucas, we devised a magical story that merges with some of the proposed musical pieces and a journey between the composers’ birthplaces and my own: Palermo.
A hint of the four concerts with me but in the different stages of a metamorphosis, effect of a dream.
We thank Francesco Viola for his answers, for promoting Croatian music around the world, and for the wonderful cooperation with the Music Information Center!
