01 / 01
Architecture buro

Video

[...] Opened with noises, rustles and vibrant fillets – almost in a scientific research of what happens from nothing to the first phoneme – the music is realized gradually in the encounter, in the reflection and in the intersection with the voice of Obama [...] The tension builds up to the point that a strong dramaturgy between music and speech emerges, making them interchangeable with each other. A well-thought-of piece of musical theater.
Monique Ciola, 29/01/2020, www.lesalonmusical.it

Fabio Cifariello Ciardi - Background checks (2020)
for spoken voice, video and orchestra

Orchestra Haydn di Bolzano e Trento
Marco Angius, conductor

On January 5, 2016, President Obama marked his final year in office with a last-ditch call for US gun control, following a mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in which 20 of the 26 victims were children. Obama certainly had notes, but didn't seem to look at them and he didn't used the teleprompter either.

The resulting speech as been described by the Washington Post as "amazingly emotional". "Background checks" aims at projecting into the orchestra the energy of Obama prosody, pauses and visual expressions.

It's a tribute to his thought on US gun safety laws and to the many innocent victims of misused weapons. "Background checks" has been commissioned by the Bolzano and Trento Haydn Foundation upon the proposal of the Artistic Director, Daniele Spini, for the 60th anniversary of the Haydn Orchestra.

Sound projection Alessandro Battisti
Video footage Simone Lorengo
Audio/video postproduction Edison Studio

 

Povero Napoleone

for tenor voice and piano (2020)

Mark Milhofer, tenor
Marco Scolastra, piano

Festival di Nuova Consonanza
live streaming, 19 Dicembre 2020

Carlo Delicati, shooting & editing
Tommaso Cancellieri, audio
Edison Studio, post-production

During the protests over George Floyd’s death, a not-so-hypothetical president is in front of the cameras.
(Un)fortunately, his address is breaking up. Is he singing an anthem or is he giving voice to an involuntary flow of consciousness? Finally taking the hints of his accompanist, he will quit the scene by singing a (strangely autobiographical) “Povero Napoleone”: an old Italian folk songs collected by Gianni Bosio e Roberto Leydi in 1962.

Fabio Cifariello Ciardi - Voci vicine (2014)
Passion in 4 parts for journalist, video, ensemble and electronics

Icarus Ensemble - Yoichi Sugiyama, conductor
with Gad Lerner, journalist
Teatro Cavallerizza - Reggio Emilia, 19/10/14

A commission of Festival Aperto 2014.
Producted by Fondazione ITeatri Reggio Emilia, Società dei Concerti Barattelli L'Aquila.

The stage is set with a journalist, an ensemble and a throng of voices and faces: Italians that bring shames about their ever-recurrent tragedies, screaming words of hatred filled with emotions. It’s the voice of indignation the media bring everyday to Italian homes: a force as well as a weakness arising from pleas, illiterate tirades of extrovert tongues. How close are we to such voices?

It’s a hard-to-describe phenomenon wavering between genuine witnesses and misleading stances. How to investigate these voices, attenuating the muddling buzz that surround them? How to fetch a meaning while avoiding easy judgments? By a proper translation.
Fabio Cifariello Ciardi has collected and classified hundreds of video interviews according to the age, gender and regionality of the participants and the reasons for their hardship. That is, he tried to bring order from disorder at first. Secondly, he channeled such a flood of words by transcribing the intonation, the rhythm and the dynamic of each spoken-voice. Thirdly, he orchestrated the data for an ensemble of seven musicians playing acoustic as well as odd sounding objects. Finally, he integrated the original voices into a multilayered sonic texture articulated through arias, recitatives, strettas an other forms inspired by the Italian Opera.
The result is a constant struggle between spoken-voices and speaking-instruments that capture and amplify the emotional intensity of the speaker while withdrawing speaker’s words. Cifariello Ciardi aim to shed a ‘musical light’ on supra-segmental phonological information supremacy over semantics bonding together voices, instrumental and concrete sounds in an audiovisual contemporary “Passion” about the most up-to-date social and cultural typicalities of Italian people.
(Roberto Fabbi)

"Voci vicine" is not a self-righteous opera, nor purely informative, nor political. It’s a contemporary work that engage at first and leave us with food for though then as we leave the hall.
(Mauro Mariani, Giornale della Musica, 12/11/2014)