projects

Amore
Atto unico da Giorgio Manganelli
Music theatre for female voice, viola and live electronics (2002)
Text by Giorgio Manganelli
Commission: Certosa di Padula/Project "Le opere e I giorni"
First performance: 2-9-2002, Certosa di Padula

Sabina Meyer (voice), Luca Sanzò (viola), Maurizio Giri (live project), Carlo Volpe (live electronics), Dörte Meyer (video)
Duration: 25 mins.

From Giorgio Manganelli's complex linguistic research of an impossible love, different registers of a lonely voice come out. The Manganelli character has a deep and painful past. The lonely cave vaguely described by the author is perhaps his own throat, a surviving fragment of his body fading away.
The musical dramatization is an exploration of sounds emerging from the read text, an analysis and an elaboration of the voice, perceived in all the colours of the spoken voice.
The sound image progressively invades the acoustical space, reaching a saturation of tension in the end, yet keeping an unreal pianissimo. The viola which accompanies the virtual voices, amplifies their moves and pauses, unifying them with indications given by the text. Manganelli's text is divided into different voices and registers, in order to realize a sort of ideal dialogue among characters coming from a solo voice. The parts of the text concerning the dialogue between who has fallen in love, and the invisible object of his love, are reported as the voice of an old and lonely man, undeceived. The second voice is very intimate and poetic, like a shadow of the leading voice, which is the writer's real and inner voice. The third voice is a whispering voice, almost reverberating and pausing, the one asking questions to the protagonist without obtaining any answers.
The video of Dörte Meyer recollects pictures coming from the Certosa di Padula (Salerno), realized during the artistic residence "Le opere e I giorni" organized by Achille Bonito Oliva in 2002.

Dedicated to Annamaria D'Agostino

Video (by Dörte Meyer) and musical excerpts from the first performance