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.