Concert for horn and voice in romagnolo dialect
for voice, horn and elaborated horn sounds with spatialization

surround diffusion 7.1

music Luigi Ceccarelli
text  Nevio Spadoni

Compagnia Teatro delle Albe
screenplay Marco Martinelli, Ermanna Montanri
scenes and costums Ermanna Montanari Cosetta Gardini
light designer Vincent Longuemare

on stage
Alcina: Ermanna Montanari
the sister : Giusy Zanini
dogs/knights: Francesco Antonelli, Alessandro Bonoli, Luca Fagioli,
Roberto Magnani, Alessandro Renda

total duration: 57′

sound realization: Edison Studio – Roma, Ravenna Teatro
horn player – Michele Fait, from “Respiri” by Luigi Ceccarelli, Produced at Studio Agon — Milan

Production La Biennale di Venezia, Ravenna Festival, Ravenna Teatro

The Dulling of Alcina

In a country village in Romagna, not far from Ravenna, there lived two sisters. The younger was her father favourite and he called her “the princess”. The elder was called Alcina (her father, a keen reader of the Orlando furioso, named her after Ariosto’s sorceress). One day the father left them, they didn’t see him any more and heard nothing about him. They inherited his job and became the supervisors of the dogs home in the heart of the village. One day a young foreigner, said to be very handsome, came to the village and began to frequent the sister’s house. The princess fell madly in love with him. After a few months the handsome young man left as suddenly as he had arrived.

CD  – L’ Isola di Alcina
Concert for horn and romagnola voice
Edition Ravenna Teatro
2000
total duration: 55′

He left the girl without saying anything and she went crazy, couldn’t look after herself. Alcina decided to take care of her sister’s everyday needs and keep her there in the big house. The two were often seen walking down the main street of the village, side by side and hand in hand. They would arrive at the dogs home, stop for a while at the gate and then go back home. Alcina had a deep, hoarse voice and authoritative gestures: she aroused fear. She greeted people only with a glance. The two sisters are now very old. The princess still has her high adolescent voice, laughs without reason and greets passers-by in song. People say that unknown to her sister Alcina also took her pleasure with the young foreigner.

“…e Alcina stia ne la sua pena”. Orlando furioso (X, 58)
Our starting point to represent Alcina’s furious daze will be here, where Ariosto pays her off. Her appearence turns by charm or a fixed destiny in a Romagnolo Alcina, time stops in her most fatal day, becoming all her days: the uselessness of the love obsession. In the poem n°VI, before Alcina loose her charming power (that makes her able to seduce and to change men into something else) before to be entirely reduced in her torturing and incurable pain for Ruggero, she’s shown as representing all the liars and tricksters building traps for the insane human illusions. She’s the owner of a world reduced to the magic power of the occult, to the common fraud that permeates life. She’s a false semblance, her face doesn’t correspond to what is in her heart, she’s a disjunction between image and substance.
We have superimposed the daze of two sisters in the Romagnolo countryside, entrangled in a charm of love traps, everyone in its unsuccessful correspondence between image and substance, as in the effects of magic, on Orlando furioso’s page. We asked Nevio Spadoni, poet in romagnolo dialect, to compose the poem of this Alcina of ours, petrified in her pain, lamentation and curse.
The language also changes its aspect and become dialect, wild language, obstinate voice, unintelligeble sound, entrangled in the “inestricabil ragna” (XIV, 52) of the love torment, “int e’ rispir longh de’ vent/ ch’e’ smesa l’acva int e’ su pas” .
There’s no action, no drama: only a vagabond voice wandering around, a vision where you could get lost as in the crash of dreams.