music Luigi Ceccarelli
for voices, trombone, ambients, and sound machines
surround diffusion 10.1

live performers
Renzo Brocculi – trombone
Elena Sartori – gregorian chant

Fanny & Alexander theater company
dramaturgy  Chiara Lagani
direction, scenes and light design Luigi de Angelis

characters
Afrodite Regina di Cuori (Elena Sartori)
Psicopompo Bianconiglio (Marco Cavalcoli)
Alice Psiche (Chiara Lagani)
sisters of Psiche (Francesca e Sara Masotti)
Pan Incubus (Mirto Baliani)

total duration 120′

Requiem is a musical theater experiment. It was conceived as if it were a contemporary opera, while fully maintaining the status of a theatrical performance. The show, by virtue of its specific experimental nature, reflecting the relationship between two codes (music and theater) was supported and produced by the Ravenna Festival. Requiem is also a reflection on the language of myth and tradition. The show tells of an abandonment and the desperate search conducted through a hell that is all internal. The reference myth is the famous “Cupid and Psyche” told by Apuleius in the “Golden Ass”. The show, born for monumental spaces (the historic monumental cemetery of Ravenna), includes an indoor version, conceived for theatrical spaces.

photo Enrico Fedrigoli
video A. Zapruderfilmmakersgroup
costumes Chiara Lagani, Laura Manzari
scenography Jacopo Pranzini, Sara Masotti, Claudio Pamelin, Sara Guberti, Antonio Barbadoro

coproduction Ravenna Festival, Kulturfabrik Kampnagel (Hamburg), Fanny & Alexander,

reviews

……We arrive at the place: a red, naked wall, tombstone or threshold to the afterlife. Around it is an arcadia of bushes and scrub, between the branches stands the white statue of the Venus de Milo: A sonorous hum becomes a deafening roar that moves; flies, hornets whiz by …… The wall lights up: lights, fires, the scene comes alive. In the air torn by sounds everywhere, run the gestures and voices of the performers competing among themselves …. Luigi Ceccarelli is the lord of thunder. In his forge, voices become metallic polyphonies, sharp with malice. Psyche’s bewilderment and nonsense generate stormy waves, open up abysses, one, a thousand trombones pour out tons of sound, as if the ships sleeping nearby woke up. But a song is born from the statue of Aphrodite: Requiem Aeternam, then Kirye, Dies Irae, Lacrimosa, Agnus Dei. The Gregorian melopea is a siren or distraction song, seductive and terrible that refracts, amplifies, fights with words. In the sound dimension, the drama of couples and antagonists – Eros and Psyche, Aphrodite against Psyche – changes into a combination of psyche and techné. Here the wonder rides at full speed, electronic technology gives words an aura, an emotional overwhelming power that seduces and captivates. The metamorphosis is continuous: sound, noise, song, word, music interpenetrate, generate one from the other in an auditory dramaturgy that eliminates the traditional word / music dualism. It is a new and therefore welcome theater, a technological neo-Baroque perhaps too seductive and imaginative; a river in flood that already carries within itself the need for an embankment to regulate its course. Chapeau! “.

Giordano Montecchi – L’Unità 8/7/01

…. Requiem: just a work of superb creative value, beautiful in itself and which will deserve new encounters and insights. Long, moved applause at the end for the whole company….

Valeria Ottolenghi – La Gazzetta di Parma

… The show draws suggestive effects from the beautiful scenographic layout, from some penetrating intuition – including that of evoking the Afterlife as a two-dimensional world of fleeting photographic images – and from the enthralling electronic music of Luigi Ceccarelli, a complex score for instruments, voices , natural noises, which, passing from remote liquidity to powerfully scraping sounds, really seem to recall echoes from beyond the grave….

Renato Palazzi – Il Sole 24 Ore 8/7/2001

“Built as an opera with a musical score (the extraordinary score by Luigi Ceccarelli), the Requiem written on the strings of an infernal journey, borrows Carroll and the plasticity of photography and plays with words as few young groups can do. A jewel of sounds and vocal bundles microphones “

Paolo Ruffini – Liberazione

… The Requiem by Luigi Ceccarelli puts into shape the question of the fascination of the soul, death, abandonment, the labors of Psyche, too beautiful to be loved, “too beautiful”, screams jealous Aphrodite, too beautiful for the terrifying monstrosity , too full of love to be loved by love itself….

Elisa Fontana – La Voce 12/6/2001

… The sounds tear the space, shattering its contours, harmonizing with the dark music of our mind. A Requiem of the senses, low, earthy, alongside the pure and unreal one of Aphrodite’s song, from the top of the Cava: dramaturgically imposing resolution of the entire sound score.

Laura Romasco – La Voce 12/6/2001

…. And the work conducted with Luigi Ceccarelli, who has built a sound fabric of great strength and charm, is also extraordinarily serious and exciting….

Oliviero Ponte di Pino – A teatro 27/7/2001

“Requiem exalts the greatness of a choral work as demanding as it is fascinating, as difficult in content as it is immediate in reading. It can be said that better than this it is difficult to represent the problem of death, abandonment, and the fascination that these exert on the soul.

Il Corriere di Rimini