Rai e Scarlatti, dagli accordi ai disaccordi

For more than twenty years, from 1949 to 1972, the Scarlatti Association organised its concert seasons on the basis of programmatic agreements with Rai, which were decisive for the association’s existence and revival, but also entailed a change in its internal balance and a progressive subordination to the public broadcasting corporation. The main architect of that cooperation was Giuseppe Cenzato, Scarlatti’s president since 1936, who succeeded in bringing into being the chamber orchestra that bore the association’s name. On the one hand, the orchestra was the fundamental pillar of the Scarlatti Association’s activity, which in the 1950s and 1960s reached greater heights in terms of quantity and quality than ever before; on the other hand, it played a leading role in the enormous development of radio music broadcasting. Through unpublished documents kept in the Fondo Cenzato of the Enel Historical Archives and in the Scarlatti Association Archives, the essay reconstructs the background, the different steps and the motivations of that collaboration, from its beginnings, in the golden age of music on the radio, to the crisis that matured at the end of the 1960s, in the wake of the social and economic changes of that time.