Thursday 29 September at 6:00 p.m.
Cloister of the Conservatorio B. Marcello
PRIVO SARÒ DEL CIELO E DE L’INFERNO
a patchwork opera world premiere
music by Stefano Alessandretti, Pietro Costantini, Riccardo Franceschini, Davide Gagliardi, Marco Marinoni, Alessio Mezzarobba, Alessandro Minichiello, Victor Nebbiolo di Castri, Julian Scordato, Giovanni Sparano, Alvise Zambon (2011, 75’)
Texts drawn from Ovid, The Metamorphoses Books 10 and 11
performers Velthur Tognoni, Daniel Castro, Lucas Carl Christ, Sonia Dainese, Nyamdori Enkhbat, Michael Fiorin, Stefano Gajon, Francesco Gaggiato, Sofiia Kryzcko, Micole Munari, Serena Munari, Salvatore Rosati, Alice Sabbadin, Rei Sopiqoti, Caterina Stocchi, Andrea Torresan, Carlo Emilio Tortarolo, Diego Vio, Pan Yige, Valeria Zane
conductor Justine Rapaccioli
live electronics Stefano Alessandretti, Marco Marinoni, Julian Scordato
live sampling Alessio Mezzarobba, Giovanni Sparano
sound direction Stefano Alessandretti
professors coordinating the project Corrado Pasquotti, Paolo Zavagna
Written, designed and created entirely by the students of the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello, Privo sarò del cielo e de l’inferno renews the successful collaboration between La Biennale di Venezia and the Venetian Conservatory. The title, which refers to the libretto by Alessandro Striggio used by Monteverdi for his Orfeo, is a tribute to the composer from Cremona.
A native of Thrace, Orpheus incarnates the chtonian connotation in a land of shamans, masters of the hermetic philosophy that acts as a mediator between the world of the living and the world of the dead by provoking a state of trance through music, techne that imprisons and seduces quite like the fruit eaten by Persephone. Music is the body destroyed and fragmented (the body torn apart by the inebriated Bacchantes) and devoured by Orpheus, a living patchwork of decadence and regeneration. It is also the lost body of Eurydice, a private desire for the capacity to dilate the Self and condemned to impossibility: Euridice’s phasma, the symbol of the inadequacy of the word/poetry to understand reality. The world can only be understood through superior forms of eros but Orpheus’ eros is as false as his logos: Orpheus is an anti-hero who penetrates into Hades in living form but does not have the courage to die for love: no heavens of heroic redemption, no hell of persisting guilt. Nothing but the space of a glance, and the loss of self. Eternally doomed to the instant of his own irreversibiity, Orpheus is the first to experience the contemporary condition.
To celebrate the διαιρεσις/διατομη of Orpheus’ body thrown into the river Evros, a patchwork opera of mobile instrumental fragments, immersed (dispersed) in an electronic amniotic liquid (Marco Marinoni).