concept and curatorship Davide Sacco and Agata Tomšič / ErosAntEros
script Ian De Toffoli dramaturgy Agata Tomšič direction and music and video design Davide Sacco with Hervé Goffings, Sanders Lorena, Marco Lorenzini, Djibril Mbaye, Agata Tomšič, Emanuela Villagrossi costume design Laura Dondoli technical team, set production, and costume-making Fondazione Luzzati – Teatro della Tosse
production Fondazione Luzzati – Teatro della Tosse, TNL – Théâtre National du Luxembourg, Ravenna Festival, ErosAntEros – POLIS Teatro Festival in collaboration with Fondazione Campania dei Festival – Campania Teatro Festival in residence at Teatro della Toscana, TNL – Théâtre National du Luxembourg, OTSE – Officine Theatrikès Salento Ellàda, Tempo Reale with the support of Comune di Ravenna, Regione Emilia-Romagna with the patronage of Pietro Valenti, Ruth Heynen, Silvia Pasello, Silvia Lodi,Remo Ceccarelli, Maria Luisa Caldognetto, Eugenio Giorgetta, all’Istituto Universitario Europeo, alCentro di Micro-BioRobotica dell’Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, a“Passaparola”e a tutte le persone intervistate, per aver nutrito il percorso di creazione dello spettacolo; a Giuseppe Bellosiper la consulenza sul romagnolo
The profoundly “political” nature of the research carried out by ErosAntEros does not run short in this new project, centred on the eminently political and pressing theme of borders and their complex meaning. Confiniis the result of a project started in 2018 by a team of international artists (like the young Luxembourg-based playwright Ian De Toffoli and actor Marco Lorenzini). Starting from the migration of Italian miners to the coal basins of northern Europe in the 1950s, the work focuses on the thorny issues of our ramshackle European Union, with intriguing forays into “future history”.
All centres on a few fundamental questions: what is a border? What is it that really separates men? And why, 70 years after the first European economic agreements, do we still not have a common political vision?
Tribute to Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) for the 100th anniversary of his birth
Rocca Brancaleone |
13 July 2021 | at 9:30 PM
Tribute to Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) for the 100th anniversary of his birth Romance del diablo
Marco Albonetti soprano saxophone and saxophone Orchestra Filarmonica Italiana
Astor Piazzolla Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas Romance del Diablo Oblivion*
Años de Soledad Libertango
orchestration by Marco Albonetti and Pablo Ziegler*
Astor Piazzolla’s music feeds on contamination, which is why purists call him “the tango killer”. But his original sin was merely the assimilation of the various influences of his multifaceted land, built on the nostalgic dreams of the emigrants. His “Nuevo Tango” incorporates elements from jazz and classical music, in an unprecedented richness of colours. As he explained, “I had two great teachers: Nadia Boulanger and Alberto Ginastera. A third one was Buenos Aires”. His Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas, an impression of the four seasons in Buenos Aires, are the Argentinian answer to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. In Marco Albonetti’s arrangement, the saxophone takes the place of the bandoneón, and gives a new voice to the feeling of time of the Porteños, those born in Buenos Aires, Piazzolla’s secret teachers.
The Paradiso Valentin Silvestrov Kyiv Chamber Choir
Basilica di Sant’Apollinare in Classe |
09 July 2021 | at 9:30 PM
New Music for Dante The Paradiso Kyiv Chamber Choir Mykola Hobdych conductor
Valentin Silvestrov In Memoriam (2020)
for acapella choir world premiere
O luce etterna (2020)
version for acapella choir and piano world premiere commissioned by Ravenna Festival
Valentin Silvestrov’s poetic sky is ablaze with two polar stars, Dante Alighieri and Taras Ševčenko, whose voices, however distant in time and space, did something similar in creating new languages: as Dante invented Italian poetry seven hundred years ago, Ševčenko founded modern Ukrainian literature in the XIX century. These two stars light up the new opera that the Ravenna Festival has commissioned from the Ukrainian composer: O luce etterna, a cantata in ten acts, mainly inspired by Dante’s Paradiso but also incorporating Ševčenko’s poem Evening. The Cherry Orchard. The two languages will be brought even closer by Silvestrov’s decision of using the Ukrainian translation of the Divine Comedy, released in 2015.
Basilica di San Francesco |
05 July 2021 | at 9:30 PM
Dante Nova
The music in the Commedia and the Ars Nova
La Fonte Musica Michele Pasotti lute and conduction Elio De Capitani narrator
Francesca Cassinari, Alena Dantcheva, Alice Borciani sopranos
Gianluca Ferrarini, Massimo Altieri tenors
Marco Scavazza baritone
Matteo Bellotto basso
Efix Puleo vielle for the arm
Teodoro Baù vielle for the leg
Nathaniel Wood slide trumpet
Ermes Giussani trombone
Federica Bianchi organ and clavicymbalum
From the wailing cries and silences of Inferno to the angelic concerts of Paradiso, these programmes revisit the pages of the Divine Comedy where music resounds. Dante wrote his Comedy around the time when Philippe de Vitry and Johannes de Muris were codifying a new musical style in their respective treatises, both entitled Ars Nova Musicæand published just before Dante’s death. They introduced a different notation system and different stylistic traits, which distinguished the new style from the music of the past, both in France and in Italy. A rich and carefully selected proposal now comes from La Fonte Musica, whose artistic imperative is a “return to the sources”, the roots of the music composed during the transition from the middle ages to humanism.
Basilica di San Francesco |
06 July 2021 | at 9:30 PM
Dante Nova
The music in the Commedia and the Ars Nova
La Fonte Musica Michele Pasotti lute and conduction Elio De Capitani narrator
Francesca Cassinari, Alena Dantcheva, Alice Borciani sopranos
Gianluca Ferrarini, Massimo Altieri tenors
Marco Scavazza baritone
Matteo Bellotto basso
Efix Puleo vielle for the arm
Teodoro Baù vielle for the leg
Nathaniel Wood slide trumpet
Ermes Giussani trombone
Federica Bianchi organ and clavicymbalum
From the wailing cries and silences of Inferno to the angelic concerts of Paradiso, these programmes revisit the pages of the Divine Comedy where music resounds. Dante wrote his Comedy around the time when Philippe de Vitry and Johannes de Muris were codifying a new musical style in their respective treatises, both entitled Ars Nova Musicæand published just before Dante’s death. They introduced a different notation system and different stylistic traits, which distinguished the new style from the music of the past, both in France and in Italy. A rich and carefully selected proposal now comes from La Fonte Musica, whose artistic imperative is a “return to the sources”, the roots of the music composed during the transition from the middle ages to humanism.
Franz Schubert
String Quartet no. 12 in C minor D. 703 “Quartettsatz”
Franz Schubert
String Quintet in C major Op. 163 D. 956
The special Schubertiade proposed by the Guadagnini Quartet with the internationally renowned cellist Enrico Bronzi opens with an “incomplete” string quartet. This famous symphony is not the only work that Schubert left unfinished, abandoning the work in 1820 after completing an Allegro of dazzling expressive tension and the first four bars of the Andante. The Guadagnini Quartet, winner of the prestigious “Piero Farulli Prize, and the famous cellist Bronzi will then move on to the Quintet Schubert completed just two months before his death, considered his finest chamber work. With its complex architecture, it is a sort of harmonic kaleidoscope where the extra cello, doubling the lower range, creates an almost symphonic atmosphere.
The sound of ancient Armenia, reinvented for the 21st century
Rocca Brancaleone |
26 June 2021 | at 9:30 PM
The Naghash Ensemble The sound of ancient Armenia, reinvented for the 21st century
Hasmik Baghdasaryan soprano
Tatevik Movsesyan soprano
Arpine Ter-Petrosyan contralto
Emmanuel Hovhannisyan duduk, flauti shvi and blul
Aram Nikoghosyan oud
Tigran Hovhannisyan dhol, dumbek (drums)
John Hodian piano
music by John Hodian
“I am leery of labels and find myself at a loss as to how to describe the music of the Naghash Ensemble. Folk or Classical? Ethnic or Cosmopolitan? Ancient or Modern? In the end, it is a natural product of someone who was raised listening only to Armenian Music in the home, studying European classical music in his youth, making a living as a jazz improviser but like all of us was constantly surrounded by contemporary rock music”. These are the words of John Hodian, composer, pianist and founder of an ensemble named after the medieval Armenian poet Mkrtich Naghash. While his music is the fruit of the diaspora, the titles based on ancient poems are meditations on man’s relationship with God by a XV-century priest and artist forced into exile for refusing to take down the steeple of the church he had built.
Basilica di San Francesco |
21 June 2021 | at 9:30 PM
E io ch’al fine di tutt’ i disii / appropinquava Paradiso XXXIII
music by Mirco De Stefani for 12 male voices
Ensemble vocale Odhecaton Paolo Da Col conductor
First performance on May 12, 2018, for the 750th anniversary of the Cloister of the Abbey of Santa Maria di Follina
In Mirco De Stefani’s composition, twelve male voices give musical garb to verses from Dante’s Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, where the pilgrim’s journey through the afterlife comes to its end and fulfilment. This work was composed in 2018 for the 750th anniversary of the Cloister of the Abbey of Santa Maria di Follina, and premièred by Ensemble Odhecaton, who will perform it again in Ravenna. The score follows the entire length of the Canto through a variety of compositional procedures: polyphonies, counterpoints, imitations, unisons, mirror and spiral canons, binary and ternary rhythms, cadenzas and resumptions. Vocal forms and structures that deliver Dante’s words in all their extraordinary evocative power.
Orchestra Bruno Maderna conductor Stefano Nanni music by Vinicio Capossela
adaptation of Li Bestiaires d’Amours (Bestiaire d’amour) by Richard de Fournival translation by Francesco Zambon
“In times of pestilence, we must talk about love.” Prophetic as usual, Vinicio Capossela interprets the era of “liquid music” in increasingly complex, ambitious and narrative works. His Bestiary of Love is a loose cannon of orchestral song-writing, both popular and philological, dedicated to all the forms love can take, and modelled on medieval bestiaries like Richard de Fournival’s XII-century Bestiaire d’amour. Capossela’s taste for the playful deconstruction of taxonomy had already showed up at the Festival in 2014, with a tribute to Saint-Saëns in his Carnival of the Animals and Other Love Beasts. The new project intends to reveal that “people in love are monsters overwhelmed by a need of showing themselves. And, since we cannot do without love, we will celebrate it in the form of a bestiary.”
Corsican polyphony, reinterpreted traditional music, and original compositions by Jean-Claude Acquaviva, Marcello Fera, Bruno Coulais
On the one hand are the strings of Ensemble Conductus, classically trained but always ready to open up to contemporary music and the unusual sounds of folk traditions. On the other hand is one of the leading Corsican groups performing traditional polyphony, A Filetta. Founded over forty years ago to contribute to the salvation of the Corsican oral heritage, the ensemble effortlessly crosses its boundaries towards such eclectic experiences like the theatre, dance, and the cinema. The traditional Corsican repertoire is integrated with instrumental parts by composer Marcello Fera, in a dialogue with the voices. In this performance, entirely new pieces by Fera are specifically intended for both ensembles, in a definitely irresistible mix.
