The Archivio Storico Ricordi has renewed its collaboration with the Pinacoteca di Brera and with the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, which has hosted it since 2003. Thanks to a greater integration of the reciprocal activities, the cultural appreciation and highlighting of the archive is well served by a more effective cataloguing of the Ricordi music collections housed in the library complex and by a constantly renewed synergy with Brera/Musica.
Catalogue
The information about the Ricordi editions of the first sixty-five years of the Milanese editor – present in the national digital library system – will be corrected and implemented in collaboration with the Ufficio Ricerche Fondi Musicali (Music Collections Research Office) of the library and the Conservatorio di Milano (Music Conservatory of Milan). Based on the numerical catalogue edited by Agostina Zecca Laterza, which has been digitalized and put online in the Archivio Ricordi digital collection, the national digital library system records will be completed, and it will be possible to connect the two digital sources, together. Furthermore, the project will allow the Archivio Ricordi to catalogue all of the editions in its possession and to make them accessible online. In this way, the archive will transform its numerical catalogue into a real library catalogue, ensuring the maximum visibility of the material in its possession with the added feature of being able to find it in the national catalogue, too.
Brera/Musica
The Archivio Storico Ricordi is the musical soul of the art gallery, library and archive complex known as the Brera. Its collections, its knowledge, and its catalogue are shared for programming the music of Brera/Musica, which includes concerts every third Thursday of the month: concerts for the family, contemporary music, and a series of international concerts. After events in Tokyo and Hong Kong, in the first few months of 2021 Bertelsmann, the Archivio Storico Ricordi and Brera/Musica will realize a special concert in Berlin at the Italian embassy. The Second Year of Pilgrimage by Franz Liszt will be executed on the piano by Clive Britton accompanied by images of Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin – the painting belonging to the Pinacoteca that inspired the composition – and some of Verdi’s adaptations of Liszt together with images from the archive. For the occasion, the archive will exhibit documents on the time that Liszt spent in the Brera area and his ties with the Ricordi music publishing house.