Photo from Andrea Centazzo’s official website.

Written by DCist contributor Catherine McCarthy

Wednesday evening, Italian-born veteran composer and multimedia artist Andrea Centazzo came to the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage as part of this year’s Sonic Circuits Festival Experimental Music. With an artistic career spanning the last four decades, Centazzo has recorded over 150 albums and DVDs, written three operas, eight books, and created three one-man multimedia shows, from which he drew most of his material for last night’s performance. Centazzo’s previous creative endeavors with big band jazz, opera and minimalist composition all come into play with his multimedia performances, merging syncopated jazz rhythms with East Asian drumming and European religious choral music.

Centazzo got a late start on the Millennium Stage after speaking to the audience about the “little bit of fantasy” they were about to experience during what he calls his “multimedia concert” format. He explained that the majority of sounds heard that evening would be pre-recorded — not all that unusual in today’s electronic scene — but unique, he said, in that all the sounds were recorded in succession in his
studio using his massive collection of percussion instruments (numbering around 200). Any mistakes we heard, he said, were recorded in real time with his own hands — not by a drum machine.