The "Giorgio Bernasconi" Ensemble, whose name pays tribute to the conductor who contributed to its creation in 2008 and which, since 2012, has been under the artistic coordination of Marco Angius, is an original didactic project that allows the students of the two-year course for orchestra professors in the Music Department to delve into a literature rarely addressed during their training period.
The aim is to bring young musicians closer to the historical twentieth century on the one hand, with the performance of milestones of modern literature, and on the other hand to the most interesting and significant musical research of today's composers.
The training includes the preparation of musical programmes under the guidance of well-known conductors, specialised in this repertoire, with the help of the First Parts of the Teatro alla Scala Orchestra, and includes an intense concert activity at the Teatro alla Scala and in prestigious venues.
His most significant engagements include the performance of Luca Francesconi's Quartett for the Wiener Festwochen in Vienna in 2012 under the baton of Peter Rundel and for the Holland Festival in Amsterdam in 2013, under the baton of Susanna Mälkki. The collaboration with the Milano Musica Festival began in 2013 with a performance of Giorgio Battistelli's L'imbalsamatore and continued the following year with a concert conducted by Fabián Panisello with the Accademy Children's Choir. In 2014/'15, he also performed Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 9 in D major in the version created by Klaus Simon in 2011 for Universal Edition Wien and Luca Mosca's Japanese Diptych at the Accademia Filarmonica Romana, both under the baton of Marco Angius, as part of the 16th Varese Municipal Music Season.
Particularly interesting was the didactic project that in 2017, over the course of several concerts at the Teatro alla Scala, saw the progressive performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's Counterpoints from the Art of the Fugue in Roger Vuataz's orchestral version (1936), compared with the original reworkings composed by great composers of the 20th century and today such as Kreuzspiel, Zeitmasse and Kontra-Punkte no. 1 by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ramifications for 12 strings (1968-69) and Kammerkonzert for 13 instrumentalists (1969-70) by György Ligeti.
In 2018, the Ensemble was confronted with an absolute genius like Frank Zappa whose The Yellow Shark was performed at the Stresa Festival under the direction of Kristjan Järvi and on tour between Milan, Rome and Reggio Emilia, under the direction of Peter Rundel, who had been the protagonist of that work with the American musician in 1993 as violinist and director of Ensemble Modern. In the same year, the Ensemble returned to the Milano Musica Festival for the 27th edition entitled "György Kurtág. Listening to Beckett" with a concert conducted by Arnaud Arbet, which combined some of the Hungarian author's works with compositions by Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky and Pierre Boulez, with Hilary Summers as soloist.
In 2019, the numerous concerts held at the Teatro alla Scala included one conducted by Missak Baghboudarian, Permanent Conductor of the Syrian National Symphony Orchestra in which the Ensemble explored composers of Iranian, Syrian, Armenian and Balkan origin as well as a young Italian composer, Annachiara Gedda. In the 2019-20 season, the Ensemble, at the Teatro Elfo Puccini, as part of the 28th edition of the Milano Musica Festival dedicated to Luca Francesconi, performed pieces by the Milanese composer and Magnus Lindberg, with two Italian premieres and one world premiere, under the direction of Renato Rivolta and with Ruben Mattia Santorsa on electric guitar. In 2021, a collaboration with the "Puccini Festival" in Torre del Lago began, in which Marco Angius conducted the students in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. The Ensemble returns to the Milano Musica Festival in autumn 2021, for its 30th edition, with a performance of Mauricio Kagel's Mare nostrum, conducted by Arnaud Arbet, as part of a composite contemporary art project hosted in the spaces of the Fondazione Pirelli Hangar Bicocca entitled Flu水o. An Encounter with Water.
In the summer of 2022, the students returned to Torre del Lago for the Puccini Festival where, under the direction of Marco Angius, they performed Wolfgang Rihm's Jacob Lenz with soloists, choir and treble voice choir from the Accademia.
