From Stage to Screen: Where Mammoccio & Iervolino Make Classical Music Cinematic

Concetta Seila Mammoccio and Patrizia Iervolino were awarded the Gold Prize and the Inspirational Creativity Musical Genius Special Prize in the Chamber Music category of the Global Genius Music Competition 2025 Summer Season.

When and why did you form your duo, and does playing music together hold a special meaning for you?

Patrizia Iervolino: Our artistic collaboration began remotely about four years ago, during the height of lockdown. Forced distancing proved to be an opportunity to seek out artists with whom I could share my inner world. Maestro Concetta Seila Mammoccio won me over with her eclectic and authentic personality, which shines through in her original musical interpretation, combined with impeccable piano technique. Each performance is a new creative challenge for me and opens up new horizons that allow us to discover and blend our different artistic temperaments.

Concetta Seila Mammoccio: Playing together sparks magic, and the inhabitants of this life need more magic. A beautiful quote by Alessandro Baricco states, "We played because the ocean is big and scary. We played so people wouldn't feel the passage of time and would forget where they were and who they were. We played to make them dance, because if you dance, you can't die, and you feel like God.

Your duet performances take the form of artistic video works, blending music with strong visual storytelling. How do you approach the creative process together—does the music shape the visual concept? What does this multimedia approach allow you to express that a traditional performance might not?

Patrizia Iervolino: For me, music and poetic verse are the true driving force behind the creative process. The image attempts to translate into visual language what notes and words already express in their own language. This kind of multimedia approach allows us to make "The Sister Arts" dance with each other, thus creating a multidisciplinary dialogue that offers the viewer multiple interpretations of artistic creation.

Concetta Seila Mammoccio: More than a visual concept, it is a mission, an artistic conception based on the videographic production of classical music, aimed at modernizing classical music, introducing it to the market, maximizing its usability, competitiveness and at the same time collective dissemination, on a par with the heavy commercialization that other musical pieces suffer from, but in the pop/rock/punk genre, through video clips, which faithfully narrate the authorial and textual compositional dimension, as happens with music applied to cinematography. For centuries, music has been based exclusively on listening, as evidenced by CDs, the audio-only recordings handed down to us and survived technological evolution, when in reality a musician's first approach to music is visual. To learn a piece, we must first look at the score, codify it in other languages, including the muscular language, which is fundamental to observe, and by playing we do nothing but run through our mind images, memories, dreams, an essential means for achieving excellent identification once we have to interpretation. Therefore, it is not an iconoclastic conception, in which music is pure ornament. Rather, it seeks to spur the listener, to draw him into other dimensions beyond the auditory impact, humanizing classical music, cultured music, making it accessible to everyone, not only in the theater, but also outside the concert hall, within reach, viewable with simple smartphones anywhere, even on the subway, making it ever-present and more closely involved in our daily lives, a music of immortal beauty.

Among the various projects you have worked on, could you talk in particular about your video for Respighi’s ‘Nebbie’? What was your concept and creative process for this piece, and how did you approach combining the music with the visual elements? 

Concetta Seila Mammoccio: Give me a camera and a piece of music, and I'll transport you to any dimension you desire! I'm a certified professional audiovisual technician and video/filmmaker, and I can tell you that when you approach works like Respighi's Nebbie, with a strong and precise connotation and personality be it technical, compositional, or interpretative- important and renowned, performed by the greatest caliber artists whose performances have gone down in history, such as Pavarotti and Levine, you feel an undeniable responsibility to the audience and, above all, to the work itself, for which you harbor a fanatical respect. After individual and in-depth musical study of the piece, from its historiography to a performance that aspires to perfection, a video project is clearly developed that is completely personalized to the piece to be performed: from the choice of costumes and hairstyles that are most faithful to the historical period, to the choice of piano, which is crucial not only sonically, a given for a pianist, but also visually, capable of conveying emotions from the instrument's construction design, a collectible Ed. Seiler piano used in the video, instantly immerses us in the work. Then it's the turn of the cameras, the shooting angles, the positioning of the lights for the chiaroscuro effects that can be achieved live, the smoke machines are programmed, to recreate arcane and evanescent atmospheres, designed to captivate the audience and make them transcend into the meanders of their own consciousness that would otherwise be unreachable, reinforced by the chosen props, such as the candelabra lamps that create an indelible impact. Bringing a video to life means allowing the work itself to live, through us who perform, and in you, the final recipients of the textual and compositional message, to which we faithfully strive to adhere. This obviously requires a thorough planning of the set that will host us during our strictly live recording sessions! Further ideas are thrown around regarding possible effects to be recreated and added in post-production, such as fades, color manipulations, from purple to black and white, typical of transmigration, in time travel, to give greater visual impact and impact to the performances, each of us contributes our comprehensive cultural background, in a shared purpose: to make the music the sole protagonist. It's a work that requires dedication, attention to detail, perfectionism, and mammoth amounts of time spent studying, filming, and editing. I'll reveal an unpublished curiosity about the video: during the filming of the fragment I later inserted for the introduction, in which a crow flies from the trees from right to left, I had placed a camera overlooking a garden where I had noticed numerous crows circling easily in previous days, for a more faithful citation of Respighi's text, confident that I would capture at least a couple in flight. The task was much more arduous than expected; I waited in front of the camera, filming the birds, for several hours, unmoving and unmoving, from late morning until dusk, as that day no crows were flying; one bird another species actually fell completely from a tree branch, but nothing else took flight. The crow you see in the video was the only one to fly, and right at the end of the day, when I was about to give up and turn off the camera! But I'd say that given the recognition the video is getting, the wait was worth it!

Would you like to share your experience participating in our competition and anyone you'd like to thank?

Concetta Seila Mammoccio: Certainly! This competition, with its wide range of categories, is incredibly important. It's a stimulus for multi-faceted improvement that encompasses various arts, a continuous opportunity for personal and professional development, a challenge to ourselves, with no age limits, to explore our potential as well as our abilities. It also offers a showcase for visibility, publicity, and promotion, not only for the individual artist, but above all for their works, their musical vision. This is what we need: qualified word of mouth that is a source of merit, recognition, and undisputed quality, and can be a source of inspiration to attract an ever-increasing audience to serious and cultured art. We owe ourselves our gratitude, tireless pioneers of an art that is constantly evolving with the world around it.

Biography

Patrizia Iervolino is a mezzo-soprano, with a degree in opera singing from the Giuseppe Martucci Conservatory of Music in Salerno and a degree in Chamber Vocal Music from the Santa Cecilia Conservatory of Music in Rome. She earned a Master's degree in Musicology with honors from the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at La Sapienza University of Rome, with a thesis on vocals in the early modern period, under the direction of Professor F. Piperno. She made her choir debut at the Teatro Verdi in Salerno in Verdi's opera "La Traviata," conducted by Maestro D. Oren and directed by Maestro F. Zeffirelli. Her solo debut took place at the Teatro Valle in Rome, performing the role of Maddalena in Verdi's opera "Rigoletto." In addition to her concert activity, she participates in various masterclasses ranging from in-depth explorations of the bel canto operatic repertoire to chamber music. From 2022 to 2023, she served as a cantor at the Cappella Musicale Giulia of the Papal Basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican.

Concetta Seila Mammoccio is a concert pianist who graduated with the Ministerial Abbreviation for Merit and holds a Master's Degree with 110 cum Laude in Piano, majoring in Performance Practice and Piano Repertoire. She performs regularly in the world's most renowned theaters and concert halls, including Carnegie Hall in New York, the Bozar in Brussels, and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. A master of virtuoso repertoire, she currently holds a record of over 50 victories in prestigious international music competitions in Vienna, Moscow, Turin, Los Angeles, Como, Berlin, London, Florence, New York, Padua, Amsterdam, Milan, Brussels, Salzburg, Bari, and Paris. As a certified video producer/filmmaker, she is a mark of excellence with over 1,500,000 views on her YouTube channel, from over 100 countries. Her video production has received global awards in New York and Los Angeles, including Best Video, Film, and Web Production, from the Telly Awards, W3 Awards, Davey Awards, Communicator Awards, Global Music Awards, Golden Classical Music Awards, and Music & Stars Awards in multiple categories: Best Instrumentalist, Best Classical Piano Soloist, Best Solo Instrumental Performance, Best Live Event, Best Sound Impact, Best Online Entertainment, Best Online Video, Best Editing, and Best Originality and Creativity. An accomplished criminologist and writer, she has authored several legal publications and literary works, including novels and poetry collections.

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