Texts
01-20-2013
Dramaturgie
In music criticism that gives a nod to art it is widely believed that theater projects need a visual and gestural language that is functional to the entire project. It highlights the dangers of projects that can be "lived" only by listening to a cd, without a corresponding completion of visual enjoyment. In the sphere of contemporary theater, Italy can boast of being one of those nations whose composers showed more passion in the task of developing the language of modern theater, probably influenced by the intense activity carried out for singing, (an historical legacy). A few years ago, it was published a collection of compositions dedicated to the new theater, with pieces dating back not more than fifteen years ago (with the exception of Berio, that with his "Sequenza III" of 1965 was one of those who opened the way to the machinations of the new order of voices). I'm referring to "Alles theater!", an updated and coincise compilation of trends in the modern theater; in that collection appeared also one of the first artistic manifestations of Roman composer Lucia Ronchetti (b. 1963) which featured her "Anatra al sal": her musical vision is unfolded in a personal way of interpreting the modern vocality with four voices fully incorporated in a dramatic text related to some events in the history of vocal style. Ronchetti was distinguished for the arrangement of some elements from different periods: a study representative of the madrigal style (used in the later books of Monteverdi and Gesualdo to describe facts or circumstances) joined to the amazing research about singing after 1950. In this new collection of Kairos, "Drammaturgie", we must certainly to share the choice to represent his "substantial" artistic part devoted to dramatic writing, although Lucia also developed depth knowledge about spectralism, that successfully transferred into music. However, returning to the dramatic breath, we see that here the drama lived in strange ways, at least different from that experienced in Aristotele's sense: the modern approach makes the proposal more intellectual and in this 'alternative' views of the events (in which it is not hard to follow the narrative subject of the composition), we find the novelty and specificity of Ronchetti's music proposal. She emphasizes the sound from the singing rather than the singing itself and this result is achieved through a relational analysis of the elements; you enter a territory aesthetically "dangerous", after Berio (to name just one) the language of the theater was in constant evolution and theoretically was inaccessible for the occurrence of critical dilemma: it was hard to give a balanced weight to emotions and intellectual content of the composition. Lucia is trying to bypass it, through the voices she draws us into unimaginable dimensions (Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart  is the ensemble of excellence specializing in contemporary vocal), trying to create functional relationships between the old and the new, between the way of interpreting contemporary vocal and poetic text; the goal is to create new and useful arguments for the theatre and avoid the idea of a fossilization of its aesthetics. So if it is true that Ronchetti has an immense courage in innovation and a full awareness of academic exploration, it is also true that it is not always possible to single out an emotional body that can impress a large musical audience not elitist ("Hombre de mucha Gravedad" and "Pinocchio, una storia parallela" is the good news): these considerations reproduce the unresolved problem of the difficulty of fruition only linked to the discographic support.
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