duration 40′
surround diffusion 9.1

1st performance: Firenze, Tempo Reale, Cantieri Goldonetta – 06 Novembre 2004

production Teatro delleAlbe

Ouverture Alcina is a reworking of the Isola di Alcina in concert form. Stage structure has a more basic version of the previous and the ratio of acting is listening, they are not being more mediated by the scene and characters of contour, it is more direct and intense.

Ouverture Alcina is a battle between the power of the voice and the power of the music, an alchemy that draw the figure of the love-woundedsorceress in her iconic immobility, a ghost that howls an untreatable pain. A “canto” in Romagnol dialect, an ultra-local language, harsh and archaic, which makes a strongpoint, objective music, of its own incommunicability. The sorceress is alone on stage, moves in the dark, here and there crossed by flashes of light which show her acting body, like that of a butoh dancer, within a sound space orchestrated live by the composer himself.

What springs forth is a concert-performance where voice and music form the same stage material. No action, no drama: only the wandering of a vagabond voice, a fabulatory vision in which you can get lost, as in the wrench of dreams. The term overture is employed in music chiefly as the introduction to an opera, but in the 19th century it also designated autonomous symphonies. It’s in this sense that we chose the term, also because of its being suspended and ambiguous between the musical and and psychic spheres: “overture”, opening, introduction to Alcina’s mental universe, to her headlong whirling.

Marco Martinelli, Ermanna Montanari

Review

Ouverture Alcina—a frightening, hypnotic bit of recitative—scratches a very, very specific itch. Are you, for instance, a fan of minimalist stagings, but histrionic actresses? Do you like opera—but have a secret desire to hear one butchered for its sonic parts? In Teatro delle Albe’s strange spoken-word aria, rending things apart is the order of the day. Ermanna Montanari speaks, shrieks and growls her Romagnol text—Nevio Spadoni’s updating of the seductive witch from Orlando Furioso—as though it’s being clawed directly from her voicebox. Around her screams the tempestuous electronic score by Luigi Ceccarelli, a noise so insane it seems to have ripped itself violently away from the libretto. Co-devisor Marco Martinelli cuts the space with icy stripes of light—though Montanari often prefers to back slightly away from us, leaving her face in darkness. The effort is to divorce every element from every other element, and to

make the susceptible among us feel torn apart as well.
The short work is only seven short sections: Alcina bemoans her fate, hurls a decent amount of invective at men (memorably she likens them to pig-shearing, “all that noise, so little wool”) and takes leave of her senses, all while flickering just at the edge of our vision. There’s no need to follow the story, since it is brutally simple. (Alcina has betrayed her sister by seducing her lover. Then she loses it.) We’re really here to revel in Montanari’s extraordinary control, her painted eyes, her full-throttle staginess. In various avant-garde experiments I’ve seen recently, characters from the great silent movies find themselves spliced into modern work. Here, without any recourse to video trickery, Teatro delle Albe gets the same effect.

Helen Shaw, Timeout, New York – Jan 7, 2011 – http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/