11/5/2016 ore 8:30pm

Voci vicine

Passion in 4 parts for journalist, video, ensemble and electronics

with Susana Regueira | journalist

KammarensembleN
Peter Fridholm | flute
Kristian Möller | clarinet
Anders Kilström | piano
Jonny Axelsson | percusion
Ivo Nilsson | trombone
Göran Fröst | viola
Chrichan Larson | cello

Renato Rivolta | conductor

Fabio Cifariello Ciardi  | sound diffusion
Lucia Bova, Valeria Carissimi | pre-recorded harps
Edison Studio | postproduzione Audio/Video
Fondazione I Teatri Reggio Emilia |  commission
Fondazione I Teatri Reggio Emilia, Società Aquilana dei Concerti “B. Barattelli” | production

Thanks for the support to Statens Musikverk, Swedish Arts Council

Cifariello Ciardi has done an admirable job on talking about
the head, the heart, and the guts of the Italian people.
Gad Lerner interviewed by Maria Paola Arbeia for La Stampa, 03/11/15

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

Cifariello Ciardi put into music the anger  and the social tensions of Italy with microphones, camera and a seven-piece ensemble. He sheds light on Italy structural defects, unique emotional expressions, rage against institutionalized injustice, as well as Italian cunning, victimhood and disrespect of rules and laws. The result is an ironic work on disillusionment that dig out recurrent communicational strategies, new and old cliché of our street protests. […] He struck me as a journalist because he reveals me something which is underlined and intimate.  A soundtrack of our society. […]
Gad Lerner interviewed by Eleanor Groppetti for www.oknovara.it, 03/11/2015

The stage is set with 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

@Gregor Khuen Belasi