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Roman Vlad's "Studi dodecafonici" is the earliest known example of a dodecaphonic piano work by an Italian composer. Vlad has continued to compose very strict twelve-tone works throughout his career (in addition to film music, and stage and orchestral works of freer character), long after such works have ceased to be fashionable. His music exhibits the expressive tension characteristic of total chromaticism, conveyed by a technique that forcibly prevents the formation of more stable harmonic patterns. His goal, by his own admission, is "sensibilizzare la tecnica dodecafonica". Through clever use of rows and large-scale formal structures, Vlad, like Berg, is able to hint at tonalities and harmonic mechanisms without actually resorting to them, in ways that are as perceptible to the ear as to the eye. A unifying device, especially in his early serial works, is the presence of the basic row in virtually every transposition. Vlad prefers to use dodecaphony to extract sonic effects from striking musical images. His images are often drawn from the "depositum fidei" of the literature of music (for example, his "Sognando il sogno" on Schumann's "Träumerei" and his "Variazioni concertanti" on a famous twelve-tone theme from "Don Giovanni").
Vlad's four dodecaphonic studies resemble in some ways the three movements of Webern's "Piano Variations". (Study 4 is a "variante figurata dello Studio1".) Study 1 has a semi-pointillistic texture reminiscent of the first movement of the "Variations", and both works organize themselves, in part, by means of mirror symmetries. Such symmetries dominate Webern's music, and have continued to preoccupy Vlad - as for example in his recent "Immagini speculari". (Mirror images in music - especially the treatment of inverted figurations and chords, and rotated harmonies - were of crucial importance to Busoni. See the discussion of Busoni and symmetrical inversion elsewhere in these program notes.) Study 2 pays tribute to baroque accompaniment in Handel's well-known style. Its Busoni-like atmosphere is easily recognizable to those who know the "Fantasia contrappuntistica", and in particular the memorable first "apparition" of the "Allein Gott" chorale in that work. In Study 3 the row gains thematic visibility, with an accompaniment that, astonishingly, makes the piece sound as if Fauré had a hand in it.
The dedication of "Studi dodecafonici" to Ronald Stevenson links the names of two of the world's pre-eminent Busoni scholars, who have been friends as well as colleagues since Stevenson's days in Rome in the mid-1950's. [Program note by Carlo Grante]
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