Music: The Roman Group

Since the war, Italy has been proud of its bumper crop of novelists, painters and sculptors. Considering the lively output,* Italians have a right to be. Last week, as a high point in Venice’s 13th International Festival of Contemporary Music, Italians listened with expectation to the latest work of three of Italy’s younger generation of composers. If festivalgoers thought they would find any one strong new current, they were disappointed. The so-called “Roman Group” in modern Italian music seemed to have as many directions as it had composers:

¶ Mario Peragallo, 40, has adopted the twelve-tone theories of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, insists he tries to make “dodecaphonic music more beautiful. . . restore some forms of cadence and free melody.” At Venice last week his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra jogged along with clearly marked rhythms and occasionally almost a melody.

¶ Mario Zafred, 28, music critic for Rome’s Communist L’Unitá, sneers at twelve-tone theories (“It’s no different from boxing, except in the ring you count only to ten”), prefers to follow Moscow-dictated formulas for “non-decadent” music. The first and last movements of his Resistance Symphony were brash and hackneyed enough to please the most fastidious commissar. But in the soft-spoken second movement and the effervescent scherzo, Zafred’s melodic sense and Latin high spirits almost rattled the composition off its one-track party line.

¶ Guido Turchi, 34, follows a more conservative line (“I detest exclusiveness and dogma”), relies on fine craftsmanship and simplicity more than experimentation. His mild-mannered Piccolo Concerto, with its pensive string passages and brilliant tone colors, was the easiest to listen to of the three new works.

Although their music didn’t help festivalgoers determine where Italian music might be heading, the three composers got a hearty welcome. The critic of the conservative Corriere delta Sera labeled Communist Zafred “a more brilliant and enthusiastic Shostakovich, more harmonious and proportioned and . . . more sincere.” Turchi’s Concerto was “a jewel of balance, reserve and nobility.” Peragallo’s twelve-tone experiments were “more intelligible and ear pleasing” than most such attempts.

As for the Roman Group, Turchi explained that they are “not what people like to call a ‘school.’ ” They merely meet once a month to argue about music over plates of pasta and bottles of white wine. If they ever agree, it is because “we’ve gone through the common experiences of our generation and we must express them to people.”

* For news of a topflight postwar Italian sculptor, see ART.