Ravenna Festival
TENEBRĘ, IL PRINCIPE DEI MUSICI
a music project by Giovanni Sollima
Monumentum pro Gesualdo, composed in 1960 for New York City Ballet, simply consists in Igor Stravinsky’s orchestration of three madrigals by the Prince of Venosa. Deprived of the original lyrics and emptied of the intimate relationship with words, the result is remote, contemporary, almost “fossil” music. Stravinsky’s idea is not too distant from Giovanni Sollima’s: in the fourth centenary of Gesualdo’s death, he draws up a programme which includes, alongside his own music, some cello versions of Don Carlo’s scores, some pages by Domenico Scarlatti, a great genius of Italian Baroque, and music by Arvo Pärt, a great Estonian composer whose minimalist aesthetics seems quite at odds with Gesualdo’s expressiveness and torments.
In collaborazione con:
