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REQUIEM
THEY CLASP A COMET IN THEIR FISTS
For Soloists, Choir and Orchestra
Silvia Colasanti music
on texts by Mariangela Gualtieri
and Latin texts from the liturgy
Director Maxime Pascal
Italian Youth Orchestra
International Opera Choir
Gea Garatti choir master
Reciting voice Mariangela Gualtieri
Singer Monica Bacelli
Bandoneon Richard Galliano
Spoleto Festival Committee 60
The Spoleto 2017 Festival wants to start with a moment of reflection and recollection by dedicating an evening to the earthquake that hit the center of Italy. Perhaps only music and poetry can approach without rhetoric to this huge mass of pain, and attempt a vivifying act. The Festival has thus commissioned Silvia Colasanti to write a Requiem, Soloists, Choir and Orchestra in which Latin texts of the Mass of Requiem dialogue with new texts written for the occasion by the poet Mariangela Gualtieri. It will be a song of release to the deaths of the earthquake, the small and great shadows, the rejection of a mournful idea of death and of a godly, judge, authoritarian and punitive God. But also a song of hope and thanksgiving. The work will have an oratorial structure with several characters: a singer / heart reduced to ashes, a voice reciting / doubting, the chorus of who does not doubt, the Bandoneon / Breath of the earth. The singer and the actress – here the poet himself – talk with Choir and Orchestra, or draw intimate and lyrical moments that alternate with choral and magical situations. Finally, it will be the solo bandoneon to personify a desire for rebirth, which is demanded of forgiveness for human smallness and thanksgiving song to earth and heaven: with pity, ardor and sweetness of which the lay rite of music and poetry are capable.