Francesco Gesualdi: Notes of passion in the contemporary accordion

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Francesco Gesualdi, born in 1973, is a leading figure on the international music scene, known for his extraordinary talent as an accordionist and his tireless commitment to music education. His concert career is studded with success: he has played at numerous international festivals, collaborated with world-renowned orchestras and performed in renowned concert halls. Each of his performances is characterised by a deep emotional intensity and impeccable technical execution, which enchants and captivates the audience. In addition to his concert career, Gesualdi is strongly committed to teaching. Currently, he teaches at the Conservatory of Music “San Pietro a Majella” in Naples, one of the most prestigious music academies in Italy.

In this interview, we will explore Francesco Gesualdi’s musical world, discovering his sources of inspiration, the challenges and joys of his career, and his visions for the future of the accordion. Through his words, we will have the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the journey of an artist who has dedicated his life to music, contributing significantly to the enhancement and diffusion of the accordion in the international music scene.

1. Professor at the Conservatory “San Pietro a Majella” in Naples, recognised by critics and contemporary music environment as one of the leading Italian accordionists committed to the development of the concert accordion, we know a great deal about your career and your projects. My curiosity, however, turns to the beginning of your studies: how old were you when you approached the world of the accordion and what motivated you? Who was your first teacher?

I was very young. At a party organised in the family context, I was enchanted by the sound of an accordion that was part of a small orchestra playing entertainment music. I was only four years old and started asking my parents if I could have my own accordion, so after two years my father bought me one suitable for my young age. When I was seven, I started studying by taking private lessons from Romolo Giaffreda, an accordion teacher from the small town in northern Calabria where I was born, Castrovillari. He was a teacher with a very personal teaching method: for several months he subjected me exclusively to rigorous theory and solfeggio lessons! I managed to survive his approach and with a true act of resilience of my will, I decided in total autonomy, as I made up for the lack of lessons on the instrument to explore on my own for a long time this marvellous and ingenious wooden sound box, full of mechanical gears capable of producing long and vibrating sounds so distinctly timbral.

After almost a year of rigorous theory, I finally began to play the accordion during lessons in the presence of my teacher, which ceased to be just theory and solfege lessons and, in a short time, thanks to his teachings, I acquired a promising technique on the instrument that allowed me to master my first accordion repertoire. My preliminary experience as a self-taught accordionist, however, immediately gave my study important self-management skills in my personal research on the instrument, a solid independence that also served me later on, during my studies at the conservatory and more generally during the span of time of my cultural and musical growth, of my skills and knowledge, marked by a great deal of reading (not only of musical content) and the study and analysis of mountains of scores from which emerged over time the substance of my concert repertoire, which I had the satisfaction of being able to play in the most prestigious musical contexts during my thirty-year concerts career. Going back to my first teacher, I continued to take his private lessons until I was fifteen years old. At that time in Italy, there was no qualification for accordionists, there were no accordion chairs at the conservatories and studying privately was a very common phenomenon everywhere, especially in provincial towns.

I have an anecdote that I remember with tenderness and perhaps also with a touch of self-mockery: Romolo Giaffreda used to take me around Castrovillari and its surrounding towns when I was very young, as a guest of the families of his many students. He used to do this to show me off, to boast about the qualities of his best pupil (so he said) and to bear witness to his rigorous teaching “method” (primum theoria et solfeggio!), which he considered very fair… These are memories of emotions that I still feel on me, also due to the responsibility I felt charged with when I was still so young. Those were, however, marvellous occasions for sociability, beautiful occasions to enjoy good, wholesome food prepared by the grandmothers of southern Italian families, in the proto-technological era! A slow food at km 0, spontaneous, unconscious at that age and in that historical phase that could be defined as ante litteram!

2. Regarding the instrument, what kind of accordion did you play at the beginning of your journey as a student? And what accordion do you play today?

The one my father bought me when I was seven years old was a small so-called “48-bass” accordion, red in colour, with the right keyboard “piano type” and the left keyboard “standard bass type”, built at the end of the 1970s by the craftsmen of the Paolo Soprani company of Castelfidardo, the famous accordion factory in the Marche region that started the great history of an instrument craftsmanship that had been taken to very high levels, both in terms of quality and quantity of production and made famous throughout the world. After this first instrument, I had several other accordions that grew in size and technical characteristics as I grew too, both technically and physically. But it was only later on that I was able to have an accordion model that had important technical innovations. As I was saying, I spent my early youth in Castrovillari, at a time in history and in a peripheral geographical context for which I felt almost isolated, a place where the actuality of the phenomena and experiences that matured in my specific field of interest arrived late or not at all, in a historical period very different from that of later years, when there were still no accordion study courses in music conservatories and before the technological revolution that allowed the generations following mine to make use of the widespread dissemination of information on the web. So, during the first part of my training, like many other accordionists of my generation, I developed my technique by practising on “standard bass” instruments (or so called Bassi Stradella) and achieving very advanced playing skills. When I had the opportunity to switch to an instrument with “free bass” (single notes also on the left keyboard), I did so by continuing to play an instrument with a “piano-type” right keyboard and a left keyboard with loose basses “for fifths” that the Ottavianelli company of Castelfidardo supplied me with.

A rich musical life, however, is made up of many paths within it, so at a certain point I switched to a new model of instrument, completely different from the one I had played up until then, with both keyboards with buttons and with the left keyboard with a converter to switch from standard bass mechanics to mechanics and with ‘single notes’ distributed by intervals of second and minor thirds. An instrument that was built for me by the Bugari company of Castelfidardo, an international factory that still today takes great care of my instruments.

3. Why did you decide to make a change?

This change from one instrument model to another occurred when I was already a mature and aware musician. I decided to follow the propitious wind of my free will as a researcher by subjecting myself to new phases of rigorous and intense study, which I courageously put in place. A will to change that stemmed from my natural interest in research music, in innovative languages, in the acquisition of an ever-growing repertoire of contemporary classical music for concert accordion created by great composers of the “music of the present”, specifically for two-manual accordions with buttons and with free bass for minor thirds.

It is not that with the previous accordion model I could not play contemporary classical music of Western European musical culture. On the contrary, I played a great deal of it, gaining unforgettable valuable experience and collaborating closely with many important composers of our time: there were many musical creations dedicated to me, written specifically for my accordion system for fifths and piano type. Later in time, however, the accordion with two almost identical button keyboards proved to be more in keeping with my needs as a researcher and with the musical demands of the contemporary music concert repertoire I was interested in, and thus more suited to my technical-artistic requirements as the interpreter of an original repertoire for accordion that was in the process of development – that of contemporary music – which I could potentially tackle in an integral manner with that type of instrument and which I could contribute to growing more and more through my work in close proximity with many composers. The model of accordion with two button keyboards that I was approaching offered a very important technical-phonic balance and exhibited a perfect pertinence to a wealth of idioms of the various accordion writings that were already defined and that were being further codified.

As I was saying, the choice of switching from one model to another of such different accordions was not a trivial one and led me to a phase of new exercitium and deep study lasting months. Bear in mind, Adele, that on the new model of instrument I transferred all my repertoire of Early Music that I was already playing with great ease and organicity on the “piano-type” and “for fifths” accordion model. In any case, the results were excellent in the end. Today, I enjoy, among other things, the advantage of being able to teach my students at the conservatory conscious fingerings and advanced accordion techniques for the two accordion models that I have been able to experience directly throughout my musical life.

4. Your wide repertoire ranges from early music (with transcriptions of Gesualdo da Venosa, Antonio de Cabezon, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach, Domenico Scarlatti) to contemporary music. Is there a common thread linking these two worlds that seem to be so distant from each other? Why did you choose early music, according to which vision?

Arvo Pärt, master of the post-modern, said in a 1968 radio interview: “I am not sure there can be progress in art. Progress as such is typical of science. Art presents a more complex situation: many objects from the past appear to be more contemporary than the art of today”. In this sentence, Pärt expresses his conviction that the past lives on in the present, regardless of its date of birth, anticipating one of the foundations of what later became post-modernism. Evidence of this conviction can be found in one of his famous compositional works, the Adagio Mozart, a trio for violin, cello and piano. In this Adagio, in a dimension of profound spirituality, the Estonian composer rewrites a Mozart page for trio, transferring it into the world of contemporary classical music, making a great visionary leap and with a cautious approach that I would describe as “masterly”.

The concert accordion is an instrument that represents an interesting synthesis of the expressiveness of string instruments, the essence of breath and timbre of wind instruments, polyphony and the finger articulation technique of keyboard instruments. With my instrument, I have chosen to consistently play both the repertoire of contemporary art music and the repertoire of early music from the European tradition.

Playing great early music with the accordion – a pioneering operation proposed with great musical personality here in Italy by Salvatore di Gesualdo, a master whose work represents a starting point for subsequent generations – has meant first and foremost for the instrument to “appropriate” a repertoire of cultured music, emancipating itself from the popular context that characterises its origins.

My work in assimilating the repertoire of early music and my research has taken into account historically informed performance practice, from which, however, I have partly freed myself by renouncing a rigorous philologism that for me is inapplicable in absolute terms with the accordion. A philological study of ancient practice is fundamental in order to then emancipate oneself from it and arrive at a way of performing that repertoire that also takes into account the accordion’s identity code. My personal interpretation of ancient music has therefore followed my desire to experience a reinterpretation of history through the accordion, an instrument of modernity but in analogy with the various keyboard instruments of that specific musical culture, suitable for experiencing a form of post-modernism. The ancient repertoire must be made pertinent to the characteristics of the accordion through specific work on sound, fingerings, phrasing and bellows articulations. The accordion must not be a means of proposing the great ancient repertoire by slavishly following the philological dictates of other types of keyboards, but it must be an instrument that plays and retraces a certain cultured tradition and interprets it according to the characteristics of an instrument of modernity.

5. Regarding Girolamo Frescobaldi’s music, you recorded a disc with the Brilliant Classics label entitled “Frescobaldi and the Art of Variation”. What can you tell us about this project?

Yes, I recorded a CD with the Brilliant Record Label. A recording project of mine was selected by the artistic direction of the well-known record company, which decided on its production after listening to some tracks I had pre-recorded. A CD that also had excellent sales and significant worldwide distribution. On the same CD, I included my recording of the Canzon francese del principe (French prince’s Song) by Carlo Gesualdo and a composition by the great Italian composer Alessandro Solbiati – written for me and dedicated to me – entitled II Movimento Da Gesualdo per Gesualdi, a clear reference to the many “my Gesualdi” so intertwined.

The music of Frescobaldi and Gesualdo is well suited to the transversal and stereophonic polyphony typical of the accordion, just to give one example. Moreover, these musics present a system of figures and interpretative theories that retain a strong expressive potential of sound, capable of inspiring a modern interpretation of the musical substance with which the pages of these great composers of history are imbued.

6. Earlier you mentioned the famous accordionist Salvatore di Gesualdo: did you know him personally?

Of course! Salvatore di Gesualdo was a great Italian musician, accordionist, creative and intellectual. I was very close to him through an intimate friendship that was strongly reciprocated and lasted several intense years (our surnames being so similar – almost a permutation! – seem an irony of fate). Salvatore di Gesualdo was the one who made me delve deeper into Frescobaldi’s music. I can proudly say that I was his confidant and pupil sui generis, in the sense, I would like to make it clear (I know he would like to read this), that I never received a single accordion lesson from him; I was never his pupil in the most orthodox form, our relationship as teacher and pupil was indirect: I was able to learn from him and grasp the meaning of many teachings during our extraordinary and interminable conversations (often late into the night) and during our long and unforgettable walks in Florence, as we breathed in the history and art of a magnificent city, under the porticoes of Piazza della Repubblica and in Piazza Santa Croce or on Via dei Neri towards Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi. I also cannot fail to recall our outings, true cultural trips to Calabria (he was a guest at my home) and Casentino (I was a guest at his home), rich in musical and concert experiences. I would like to recall, with appreciation, that Salvatore inaugurated the Sybaris Theatre in my town, restored to new splendour to the citizenship in 1999, and he did so with an inaugural concert of my Castrovillarese Festival, which I conducted for five years in my home town when I was very young.

I remember our shared passion for figurative art, for collecting, for the literature and poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin and Paul Celan, our common interest in musicians such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, our passion for György Ligeti, Anton Webern and Luigi Nono, our interest in the music of certain composers from a certain Tuscan cultural milieu such as Gaetano Giani Luporini, Luigi Dallapiccola and Mario Bartolozzi. Di Gesualdo has greatly inspired some of my cultural choices, many have been the cues and challenges of knowledge that he has thrown at me in the search for my own personal knowledge and in the definition of my own strong and coherent musical personality.

7. Among your projects, there is one that you devised and curated in 2009, Futurismo in periferia, supported by the University of Calabria, where the show debuted, then replicated in Rome and Vernio. I am Calabrian, and I was a former student at Unical, could you tell me more about this experience?

My original projects, in the sense of unpublished projects conceived by me, have been many. I have not only been involved in the accordion’s interpretation of early music, but very much in contemporary music, that which in fact represents the art music repertoire of the concert accordion. Since you ask me about my project on the historical avant-garde of Futurism, I am happy to talk about it.

Futurismo in periferia (Futurism in the suburbs) is based on a poetry anthology edited by historian Vittorio Cappelli of the University of Calabria and published by the well-known Calabrian publisher Rubbettino. It is a collection of Futurist poems by Calabrian authors who adhered to Futurism. The collection included youthful poems by Giuseppe Carrieri, lyric tables by Luca Labozzetta and the much more famous Leonida Rèpaci, as well as poems, lyric tables and theatrical syntheses by Rodolfo Alcaro, Piero Bellanova, Alfonso Dolce, Leonardo Russo, Giovanni Rotiroti and Luigi Gallina. I was very struck by the figure of historical and cultural interest of this anthology of lesser-known authors of Futurism and in particular I was struck by the figure of literary interest that characterised the works of some of these authors in the publication – all authors of Calabrian origin who worked, lived, some left and never returned, others then returned and in fact never left Calabria – during the years of the historical avant-gardes. So I took the initiative to ask some Italian composers with whom I had already worked to set some of these authors’ texts to music. I asked the Italian composers Mauro Cardi, Mario Cesa, Alessandro Magini, Vittorio Montalti, Alessandro Solbiati, who enthusiastically agreed and wrote a few compositions that became an entire concert programme for an ensemble that I chose and submitted to each of them: reciting voice, baritone voice, oboe, accordion. The project was premiered at PTU (Piccolo Teatro Unical in Cosenza), at the Accademia di Danimarca in Rome, and in Vernio (Prato) at the Museo della Macchine Tessili. The group of performers of this music written for me were, in addition to myself, the extraordinary voice of baritone Maurizio Leoni, the talented oboist Fabio Bagnoli, and the creative and visionary reciting voice of Anna Laura Longo.

8. Your concert and teaching activities also include your role as Artistic Director of GAMO (Gruppo Aperto Musica Oggi), one of the oldest and most distinguished Italian institutions dedicated to contemporary music. What kind of projects and collaborations are carried out?

GAMO is one of the oldest and most distinguished Italian institutions dedicated to contemporary music. It was founded in 1980, in Florence, by Giancarlo Cardini, Liliana Poli, Vincenzo Saldarelli, Albert Mayr and Massimo De Bernart with the intention of providing the city with an additional instrument of information on contemporary music, ideally linking up with the Vita Musicale Contemporanea founded in Florence by Pietro Grossi that, together with the Settimane di Nuova Musica in Palermo, the Concerts at the Teatro di Bacco in Florence and Nuova Consonanza in Rome, made the European and American avant-garde known in Italy in the late 1950s and early 1960s. From the very beginning of its historic artistic experiences, the historical group GAMO was made up of the above-mentioned founding members and musicians of the calibre of Roberto Fabbriciani, Ciro Scarponi, Fernando Grillo and Francesca Della Monica.

In its forty-five years of activity, GAMO has performed over five hundred concerts, many of them with programmes featuring numerous world premieres. From the very beginning, GAMO’s activities have been characterised by concert seasons dedicated to the contemporary classical repertoire, the project of an audio library, cycles of lectures and round tables, and the organisation of master classes on contemporary classical music.

For fifteen years I have been proud to direct this historic association and in recent years I have also founded an ensemble – stable and in residence in each GAMO season – which I direct. Yes, in recent years I have been devoting myself to a long-standing passion of mine, that of music direction, and I have been doing so especially on the repertoire of today’s cultured music. Being artistic director of a historic institution and music director of its ensemble-in-residence is a reason for me to take on great responsibility, commitment and much value.

9. So you founded an ensemble-in-residence, the Gamo Ensemble, within your association: can you explain in detail what your chosen repertoire consists of?

In addition to my teaching activity at the Conservatory “San Pietro a Majella” in Naples and at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole, my concert activity and my activity as music director, my personal profile also includes that of cultural organiser. Since 1997, I have been involved in cultural organisation and in particular in the management of concert seasons. Today, I am the artistic director of G.A.M.O. and, as mentioned, also the musical director of its GAMO Ensemble. I invite those who read us to visit the GAMO website (www.gamo.it) where in the ensemble section you can find many projects signed by me. A characteristic feature of the GAMO Ensemble is the presence in the ensemble of the accordion (and an accordionist), which is almost always present in the projects and new productions that GAMO realises. It is a choice resulting from my obvious love for the instrument and my constant interest in developing the chamber repertoire for the accordion.

10. As already mentioned, you currently teach at the Naples Conservatory and previously taught in Frosinone and Avellino. How is the accordion considered and heard within these institutions? Is there any difference by changing territory?

Today I teach in Naples at the prestigious Conservatory “San Pietro a Majella” where I inaugurated the first chair of accordion in 2019. In 2026, the Naples Conservatory will celebrate its 200th anniversary since its foundation, a truly impressive milestone and one of the greatest historical significance.

In the past, I had a great time both in Avellino at the “Domenico Cimarosa” Conservatory (here too, I inaugurated the first ever chair of accordion at the institute and left it when the number of chairs had become two, the only case in Italy), and in Frosinone at the “Licinio Refice” Conservatory. Two well-organised provincial conservatories where I trained a large group of young people who, after graduating, became excellent professionals and some of them also good active concert performers.

The differences that can be felt when moving from one conservatoire to another in different geographical areas are the natural ones that can be felt when changing environment and geographical context. Aside from the natural environmental differences, I can certainly say that in the two provincial conservatories, Avellino and Frosinone, I worked very well and for many years, leaving there wonderful memories of very positive teaching and artistic experiences shared with students, colleagues, and the directors of the institutes.

Now in Naples I am in a great city and in a very prestigious and historic old conservatory, where step by step and after the pandemic I am settling in and building a talented class of new accordionists. It was precisely at San Pietro a Majella that I recently promoted an important cultural initiative at its authoritative and important library: I facilitated the donation, by musicologist Renzo Cresti to the prestigious library, of a significant corpus of scores from the Cresti archive – some of them autographs – by authors of music of the second half of the 20th century. The initiative was accompanied by an interesting conference attended by the musicologist Renzo Cresti himself, the director of the conservatory Gaetano Panariello, the director of the library Cesare Corsi, myself and the accordionist – my former pupil – Pietro Paolo Antonucci, who played music by Franco Donatoni and Jukka Tiensuu. My teaching experience in Italian conservatories gave rise to the Rows Ensemble, the group of five accordions that is now a stable group that performs specific original projects. My teaching work also takes place at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole (a municipality located on a hill in Florence), the historic school founded by the celebrated Piero Farulli, viola player of the Quartetto Italiano. Since 2017, I have been teaching at this school where one can study accordion as in a state conservatory and obtain qualifications recognised in Italy and Europe.

11. Let’s turn to a slightly more personal question: between concerts, teaching and other projects you are involved in, how do you combine private and professional life?

As long as my family can keep up with my work schedule, I will be able to combine all my eclectic musical activities. My partner, by the way, is an accomplished pianist, so she is well aware of the commitment of this profession. I would not like to forget to mention among my pleasant commitments also the unfailing care I have for my fifteen-year-old son, a cello student and high school student at a historic Florentine high school. In general, I do not mind at all working inside music for eighteen hours a day. Of course, I must confess that the energy expended is a lot and fatigue sets in, but making music, living off music, makes it all go away, I hope.

12. We know your career is studded with important projects and exclusive experiences, can you tell us something about your latest artistic projects and some from your recent past?

Among my most recent experiences is the publication of the world’s first recording, i.e. the first public recording on CD, of a historic composition for five accordions by Mauricio Kagel, entitled Aus Zungen Stimmen. It is a 1972 composition by the great Argentinean master that I recorded with my five-accordion ensemble. The production was handled by the EMA Vinci label and was supported by the Burghardt-Kagel Foundation in Basel. It is a record release that fills the only remaining gap in the enormous mosaic of recordings of Mauricio Kagel’s entire oeuvre, which was missing the last piece, the recording of
Aus Zungen Stimmen.

With my quintet we worked on a new creation by the Roman composer Patrizio Esposito, a composition written for us and dedicated to us, intended for the entire quintet and expanded within a video creation that interacts simultaneously with the live performance of the five accordions.

In the summer of 2023, I took part in the world premiere of a new composition by Georg Friedrich Haas, for fifty pianos in microtonal tuning and large instrumental ensemble, commissioned by the Busoni-Mahler Foundation from the world’s best-known and most appreciated Austrian composer. It was a major production of the Bolzano Festival Bozen that involved the extraordinary young musicians of the Gustav Mahler Akademie, some of the famous musicians of the Klangforum Ensemble, fifty pianists from all over the world, and my unique and much appreciated accordion in the large orchestral ensemble.

Among my recent recordings is a composition for flute and accordion by Luigi Manfrin with flutist Laura Bersani. The recording will soon be included in a monographic CD by the composer, a scholar of the spectralists, their aesthetics and the compositional work of Fausto Romitelli.

Next September I will renew my collaboration with the composer Luigi Manfrin by realising a world premiere performance project dedicated to some works by Tintoretto, one of the greatest exponents of Venetian painting and art of the entire Renaissance, from which the composer soon drew inspiration to write five new compositions, for solo accordion and electronics, for accordion-sax-piano-bass and electronics, and for other combined formations always based on this four-instrument ensemble. The concert featuring the world premieres of these five new compositions by Manfrin will include the simultaneous projection of images of Tintoretto’s paintings.

On July 29th I will return as a guest of the Accademia Chigiana Festival, one of the most important in the world, with a recital of my own with a programme featuring music by Aldo Clementi, Girolamo Frescobaldi, György Ligeti, Carlo Gesualdo and Sylvano Bussotti. By Bussotti I will perform Puccini a caccia, poemetto for accordion, percussion and invisible voice, a composition of rare performance and beauty that I have already played for the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago.

As director of my ensemble, in recent times I have worked with composers such as Claudio Ambrosini, Mauro Cardi, Alessandro Solbiati, Mauro Montalbetti (I also recently performed for the Ente Concerti Pesaro the world premiere of his piece for accordion written for me) – performing some world premieres – and I directed a monographic programme dedicated to the centenary of Luigi Nono’s birth, in a concert included in the 86th Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Festival.

I will soon return to play in concert my programme for accordion and electronics that was created in the ZKM centre in Karlsruhe back in 2014 and recorded for another record production EMA Vinci, which boasts of significant critical and performing success. Other projects, both as the conductor of my ensemble, as a cultural organiser and as an accordionist, are being developed and realised between the end of 2024 and all of 2025.