Sonora 709 - Classic

Music around Caribe

The concert dedicated to René Francisco's exhibition, linking back to its title, celebrates the collaboration between the Cuban double bass player and two of the most important names in jazz and Latin music, in a unique encounter inspired by the musical form that first spread from Cuba to Europe: the Habanera. An unprecedented set that moves through the intertwining of Latin American forms, to which so much musical imagery on both sides of the ocean is indebted.

Gaston Joya - double bass

Gabriele Mirabassi - clarinet

Roberto Taufic - guitar

J. S. Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major, BWV 1048

Jean Sibelius: Canzonetta, Op. 62a

Vanni Moretto: Ex silentio (Italian premiere)

W. A. Mozart: Piano Concerto in E-flat major, K. 271 “Jeunehomme”

This program could be considered a small compendium of the different ways in which the individual elements that make up an orchestra can interact and relate to each other.

In Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto, written for nine strings (divided into groups of three) and basso continuo, the individual components are called upon to engage in a dense concertante dialogue in which the responsibility for both the solo passages and the dense, pulsating texture that sustains and drives the entire composition is shared equally by all. After this sort of incandescent fireball, which, except for a brief central suspension, releases energy with equal intensity throughout its development, we move on to Jean Sibelius's ‘Canzonetta’, taken from the incidental music for the play ‘Kuolema’ (death in Finnish). Here, it is the power of the melody that shapes the writing of the piece, organizing the sections of the ensemble into singing roles, alternately entrusted to the first violins and cellos, and accompanying roles. The rarefied atmosphere, the pace, and the “color” of the sound prepare the audience for the third piece on the program: Ex Silentio by Vanni Moretto. Presented here in its Italian premiere, this piece, commissioned from the Milanese composer in 2024 by the Opéra-Théâtre de Clermont-Ferrand, features a new distribution of roles dictated by the form of the concerto for solo instrument and orchestra.  The orchestra opens the piece by offering a landscape with uncertain contours from which the solo violin draws the elements to shape form and meaning; on the one hand, the world, on the other, the individual experience that interprets and shapes it in its own interiority and determines its narrative. Another piece for solo instrument and orchestra, this time no longer for strings alone, concludes the program. This is Mozart's Piano Concerto K. 271, “Jeunehomme.” In the evolution of this form, to which Mozart made an enormous contribution, the Jeunehomme represents a decisive turning point between the style of the Salzburg period and that of the Viennese period. The soloist dialogues with the orchestra from the very first bars, according to a concept that clearly goes beyond the juxtaposition of soloist and orchestra, intertwining the musical discourse in a logic of continuous exchange. The protagonist is precisely this dialogue, rich in ideas, surprises, digressions, and different emotional states. It is a hierarchically mobile dynamic to which the soloist and orchestra contribute with equal force of necessity.

J. S. Bach – Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (version for string trio)

A masterpiece of keyboard music (and music in general), the Goldberg Variations are presented here in a version for string trio. This composition, completely unusual for Bach, who had rarely written a theme and variations before, is said to have been written for the young virtuoso pianist Goldberg to help his patron and commissioner of the variations, Count Keyserling, fall asleep. A circular work made up of golden proportions both in its overall structure and in the individual variations, which sometimes (as in the Quodlibet) echo German folklore. ‘It is music, in short, that knows neither beginning nor end, music without a real climax and without a real resolution’ (Glenn Gould).

MAXIMA IMMORALIA
Chamber opera for voices and instruments

Libretto and music: Orazio Sciortino – Edizioni Curci

Orazio Sciortino – Conductor

Voices:
Maria Eleonora Caminada
Giulia Peri
Giulia Zaniboni

GAMO Ensemble
Marco Facchini – Violin
Lucio Labella Danzi – Cello
Nicola Tommasini – Accordion
Fabio Fornaciari – Piano
Federico Tramontana – Percussion

Maxima immoralia is a chamber opera between eros and satire. The libretto was written in the style of that successful, daring, and irreverent literature, in prose and verse, produced between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. 

On stage there is only one character, a single woman, but with three voices, who recounts, through a structure of closed numbers, unconsummated marriages, prostitute nuns, dormant desires and daring fantasies, references to unedifying episodes in the history of the Church, with nods to the world of madrigals representative of the Baroque era, grotesque masks, and even popular cunto. 

Live music, made up of sounds suspended in time and based on unconventional sound emission techniques, in which a small ensemble together with a vocal trio takes the audience on a poetic journey full of biting irony.

Otherworldly realms and magical beings in ancient Nordic traditions

A journey into the afterlife on the wings of an ancient Norwegian poem; enchanting spirits that populate traditional Swedish ballads and legends: Brú's music lifts the thin veil between reality and mystery and leaves us with a question... “Is there really a boundary?”

Concept, composition, and arrangements by Krishna Nagaraja

Program:

• Draumkvæde I: The frame of the vision
  (trad. Norwegian / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Swedish Medieval Ballad: "Herr Olof"
  (trad. Swedish / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Intermezzo: "Polska efter Pelle Fors"
  (trad. Swedish / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Draumkvæde II: Gjallarbrú, the bridge to the afterlife and its fierce guardians
  (trad. Norwegian / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• The Blue Goat set
  (trad. Swedish / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Swedish Medieval Ballad: "Lindormen" ("The Dragon-Serpent")
  (trad. Swedish & A. Norudde / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Intermezzo: "GjallarBrú"
  (K. Nagaraja)
• Draumkvæde III: Journey beyond death
  (trad. Norwegian / arr. and improvised Brú)
• Himlens polska (Polska of Paradise)
  (trad. Swedish / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Dansen Ungdom (Dance, young people)
  (trad. Swedish / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Martins Begravning (Martin is buried)
  (trad. Swedish / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Intermezzo: "Näckens polska" ("The Näcken’s polska")
  (trad. Swedish, text A.A. Afzelius (1812) / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Draumkvæde IV: The Day of Judgment
  (trad. Norwegian / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Domedagslåtten (The Day of Judgment)
  (trad. Norwegian)
• Swedish Medieval Ballad: "Näcken och Jungfrun" ("The Näcken and the Maiden")
  (trad. Swedish and Norwegian / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Draumkvæde V: Epilogue
  (trad. Norwegian / arr. K. Nagaraja)