Fabio Vacchi (; born February 19, 1949) is an Italian composer.
Biography
Training and debut
Fabio Vacchi studied at the Conservatorio Giovanni Battista Martini of Bologna with Giacomo Manzoni and Tito Gotti. In 1974 he participated in the courses of the Tanglewood Festival in the United States, where he was awarded the Koussevitzky Prize in Composition. In 1976 he won first prize at the Gaudeamus Composition Competition in the Netherlands, with the work Les soupirs de Geneviève for 11 string soloists. In the same year, he wrote Sinfonia in quattro tempi, conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli for the Venice Biennale Festival, which thereafter dedicated to him two monographic concerts in 1979 and 1981. In Venice, where he lived from 1984 to 1992, he met and was supported by Luigi Nono, who invited him at the Experimentalstudio der Heinrich-Strobel-Stiftung, Freiburg.
From the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino to the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berliner, the Gewandhaus and the Carnegie Hall Vacchi made his debut at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Festival in 1982 with Girotondo, an opera whose libretto was adapted from Arthur Schnitzler. Following this opera came Il Viaggio (Teatro Comunale di Bologna, text by Tonino Guerra), – in the same year, 1990, when he attended the New York Festival of Contemporary Music with L'usgnol in vatta a un fil - then La station thermale, with a libretto by Myriam Tanant from Goldoni - produced at Opéra de Lyon (1993), afterwards at La Scala and Opéra Comique de Paris (1995). He also wrote Sacer Sanctus (1997) for chorus and instruments, text by Giuseppe Pontiggia, "a work commissioned by La Scala (1997) and repeated at the Festival of Ravenna (1998), the Festival Présence 2002 in Paris and S. Cecilia in Rome in 2003", En Vinternatt (for a tournée - October–November 2001 - of the Gustav Mahler Chamber Orchestra conducted by Sir Neville Marriner).
For the musical theatre he has subsequently written Les oiseaux de passage (Opéra de Lyon, Teatro Comunale di Bologna, 1998–2001) and, in 2003, Il letto della Storia, with a libretto by Franco Marcoaldi and stage direction by Giorgio Barberio Corsetti. For this opera, he received the Abbiati Prize from the National Association of Italian Critics for the best new work of the year. The partnership with Marcoaldi has continued, bringing about such works as Terra comune (which, at the request of Luciano Berio, inaugurated Rome's Auditorium Parco della Musica in 2002), Tre Veglie commissioned by the Salzburg Festival (conducted in 2000 by Ivan Fischer, with Anna Caterina Antonacci), and the second opera for the Teatro alla Scala, Teneke (2007, chosen for the That's Opera event, on the occasion of the bicentennial of Ricordi, curated by Jean-Jacques Nattiez) conducted by Roberto Abbado, stage direction by Ermanno Olmi, with set design by Arnaldo Pomodoro.
Vacchi's music was again heard at the Salzburg Festival in 2006, during the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, with a performance by Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Riccardo Muti of La giusta armonia, a melologue with narrator and orchestra based on a text by the proto-socialist Franz Heinrich Ziegenhagen, who was a friend of Mozart. Worthy of mention is Voci di notte (2006), commissioned by the Orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, on the occasion of the 70th birthday of their conductor Zubin Mehta. Mehta is one of many conductors, such as Berio, Chung, Harding, Marriner, Pappano, and, as already mentioned Muti and Abbado, who have conducted Vacchi's music a number of times.