Isabella Marchetti joins the strings faculty

Isabella Marchetti's name is already woven through the programme notes of half a generation of SMFOG students. She entered the conservatory as a nine-year-old in the winter of 1995, studied six years with the late Maestro Colombo, and left on a scholarship to the Hochschule in Vienna with a Guadagnini on loan from the school's instrument bank.

Three decades later she returns, this season, as second violin and as head of the Friday chamber seminar — a weekly practice the faculty has held, in some form, since 1921. "It is not a homecoming," she said at a small luncheon on the first floor of the chiostri, "because I never really left. The chapel acoustic stays in your ear. You hear it in every other hall afterwards."

Her duties begin on the twelfth of September, the morning of the Opening Night rehearsal. The programme — Prokofiev's Classical, the Ravel G-major, Schumann's Fourth — was chosen in consultation with her over the winter and will, she told us, "be the quickest way for the students to find out whether I am a teacher they want."

Marchetti's recorded legacy is substantial. Her cycle of the late Beethoven quartets with the Quartetto Stradivario (Æterna, 2017) remains, in the opinion of this journal, the most thoughtful reading of those works in two decades. She has also championed living composers: Saariaho's Nocturne; Ades's third quartet; the two unpublished violin sonatas of Brescianello that she herself edited from the Archivio Civico.

The strings department will welcome her formally at an open recital on the second Saturday of October. Faculty and diploma-class students have been invited to submit chamber entries for a programme she will curate herself. Seats, as ever, are held for members until the Tuesday prior.

“The chapel acoustic stays in your ear. You hear it in every other hall afterwards.