REQUIEM

The 2017 Spoleto Festival wants to restart with a moment of reflection and recollection by dedicating an evening to the earthquake that struck central Italy. Perhaps only music and poetry can approach without rhetoric to this enormous mass of pain, and attempt a life-giving act. The Festival has thus commissioned to Silvia Colasanti to write a Requiem, for Soli, Choir and Orchestra in which Latin texts from the Mass from Requiem dialogue with new texts, written for the occasion by poet Mariangela Gualtieri. It will be a song of farewell to the dead of the earthquake, to the small and large shadows, a rejection of a mournful idea of Death and of an angry, judgmental, authoritarian and punitive God. But also a song of hope and thanksgiving. The work will have an oratorio structure, with several Characters: a singer/HeartReduced to Ashes, a reciting voice/TheDoubting One, the Chorus of Those Who Do Not Doubt, and the Bandoneon/Respiroof the Earth. The singer and the reciting voice-here the poet herself-dialogue with Chorus and Orchestra, or draw intimate and lyrical moments, which alternate to choral and magmatic situations. Finally it will be the solo bandoneon to personifying a desire for rebirth, which is a plea for forgiveness for human littleness and a song of thanksgiving to earth and heaven: with the piety, ardor and sweetness of which the secular ritual of music and poetry are capable.