23-09-2010

02-10-2010

Italy, Venice

Posted by: artcitizens

Category: Festival/Biennial/Triennal

Field: Music

Source http://www.labiennale.org

Don Giovanni and the man of stone
Director Luca Francesconi


27 world premieres (of which 18 commissioned by La Biennale), 15 Italian premieres, 77 composers, 31 events including concerts, installations, audio-visual performances, choral music as well as workshops, seminars, meetings throughout the entire ten-day programme, from September 23 to October 2 in Venice: these are the figures behind the 54th International Festival of Contemporary Music, titled Don Giovanni and the man of stone, directed by Luca Francesconi and organized by the Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta.

In continuity with the commitment of the Biennale di Venezia towards the younger generations, the Music Festival – observes President Paolo Baratta – will become the stage for prestigious groups but also for young and very young professional ensembles, such as MDI, the two wind and percussion ensembles from the Malmö Music Academy, and L’arsenale, that was asked to perform one of the most important pieces in its history, Quando stanno morendo. Diario polacco n.2 by Luigi Nono, presented at the 1982 Music Biennale. This is the reason why the Festival promotes opportunities to discover and encourage the talent of the new generations, and has invited student artists and musicians – from the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice – to measure their skills and stimulate their creative originality in contact with the professional world of composers, singers, choirs, musicians, actors, set designers and directors, all involved in producing the inaugural event, Don Giovanni a Venezia.

Titled Don Giovanni and the man of stone, the Festival refers not only to the famous opera by Mozart, but to one of the central myths of western culture, the myth of Don Giovanni: within the conflict between human finiteness and its aspiration to eternity, between the body and the spirit, reverberates the relationship between the immortality of the work of art and the inexorable breath of time, between the written and the oral, between tradition and modernity. These themes weave through the 54th International Festival of Contemporary Music and find their synthesis in Don Giovanni a Venezia.
Scheduled to open the Festival on September 23 at Palazzo Pisani, the home of the Conservatory, Don Giovanni a Venezia is a totally new opera-installation conceived by Luca Francesconi: a plurality of events – musical, scenic, theatrical, visual – will be scattered throughout the courtyards, the loggias and the indoor spaces of the ancient Venetian building and will “turn on” cyclically, disrupting our perceptive habits of space and time. The exquisitely musical plot, based on the cross-connection between different eras, is constituted by three key scenes from the original opera by Mozart – the opening duel, the seduction of Zerlina, the death of Don Giovanni – with the counterpoint of 8 original pieces inspired by the theme, commissioned by the Biennale to Martina Tomner, Pierre Jodlowski, Federico Troncatti, Gabriella Zen, Marcello Filotei, Michele Tadini and by the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello to Marco Marinoni and Francesco Zorzini. Tying together the threads of this unusual mise-en-scène will be director Francesco Micheli, whereas the musical dramaturgy will be work of Michele Tadini, who will also supervise the entire operation from a centralized audio and video control centre, made possible by the extensive cabling system of the Conservatory. A complex theatrical machine and a challenge in both creative and productive terms, Don Giovanni will involve over 130 artistic and technical masses, made possible by the joint commitment of four Venetian institution: the project by the Biennale Musica will include the participation of the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello, the Teatro La Fenice and the Accademia di Belle Arti.

Along with this experimental opera which will challenge our perceptive habits, Luca Francesconi has disseminated other “episodes” throughout the Festival that are conceived to stimulate the public to enjoy music in a different way. The three single acts by Matteo Franceschini (Il gridario), César Camarero (En la medida de las cosas) and Hannes Seidl & Daniel Kötter (Freizetspektakel) represent three experimental compositions which, each in their own way, call the visual aspect into play as a dramaturgical element, and are presented by Francesconi in sequence on the same evening, suggesting a comparative experience (September 24, Teatro Piccolo Arsenale). Commissioned by the Biennale di Venezia, Musicadhoy of Madrid and Musik der Jahrhunderte of Stuttgart as part of the ENPARTS (European Network of Performing Arts) project, the three chamber works will make their world premiere debut in Venice.
Extempore (September 26, Teatro alle Tese) was conceived along the same lines, bringing together three concerts the same evening which present three different ways of “writing” music: radical improvisation with Evan Parker and his ensemble; interpretation, represented by the pianism of Ciro Longobardi; and aleatoric music, with 5 different composers involved in rewriting an exemplary piece, Serenata per un satellite by Bruno Maderna.
The same idea underlies the final performance, Exit (October 2, Teatro alle Tese), now in its third edition: a formula conceived by Luca Francesconi which is adapted each time to different substance, but with the founding idea of bringing together a plurality of musical forms that attracts different audiences. The new experiment that Francesconi intends to conduct this year concerns the simultaneity of events. The idea of creating a space at the Teatro alle Tese which is a metaphor for web surfing, i.e. which simultaneously offers various options for musical enjoyment.

A singular tribute to Bruno Maderna and another to Franco Donatoni run through the entire Festival, characterized by the introduction of new compositions: Vittorio Montalti, Filippo Del Corno, Federico Troncatti, David Lang and Yan Maresz were commissioned by the Biennale to write 5 original pieces inspired by Maderna’s Serenata per un satellite; whereas Paolo Aralla, Sandro Gorli, Arturo Fuentes, Yoichi Sugiyama, Luca Cori and Giorgio Magnanensi, Donatoni’s students and friends, will present world premieres of pieces that evoke the teachings of the Maestro from Verona. The same concert will also feature an array of works by Donatoni for chamber ensembles: Lumen, Elly, Ronda, Rima, Bok and Arpège (September 28, Teatro Piccolo Arsenale). The concert by the Orchestra dell’Arena di Verona, finally, will celebrate the two composers with the performance of Maderna’s last work, the Concerto n.3, and two works by Donatoni, In cauda II and Hot (October 1, Teatro Piccolo Arsenale).

The winner of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, Wolfgang Rihm is another composer at the centre of the Festival’s celebrations: the author of music that is “always rooted in the material of sound, in rhythmic and harmonic power, with a lucid formal organization”, Rihm will be represented by two of the most important works in his artistic career, performed by the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai (September 30, Teatro Malibran): Schwebende Begegnung, Diptychon and Schwarzer und roter Tanz.

Along with the great orchestras, protagonists of the Festival, the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai, the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto, the Mitteleuropa Orchestra, there will be many national and international ensembles, which have long been the dynamic performers of so much contemporary music: Intercontemporain, MDI, Resonanz with the Schlagquartett Köln, the Wind and Percussion Ensembles of the Music Academy of Malmö, L’arsenale, the Arditti Quartet and the Teatro La Fenice Quartet , and the vocal ensembles of the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Accentus/Axe 21 and the Chorus of the Latvian National Radio. Champions of contemporary music, the Intercontemporain puts together a program with Laborintus II by Berio and the triptych by Romitelli, Professor Bad Trip; the Arditti Quartet presents pieces by Wolfgang Rihm, Daniele Bravi, Stefano Bulfon, and Michele dall’Ongaro. Finally, two concerts for piano solo with two outstanding performers such as Ciro Longobardi and Jan Michiels.

In its collaboration with orchestras and ensembles from the Veneto region, with institutions such as the Teatro La Fenice, the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello, the Accademia di Belle Arti, the Archivio Nono, the Fondazione Cini, the Università Ca' Foscari, the Biennale seeks to cultivate the resources of the region to project them into international-level projects. It is in this perspective that the Regione del Veneto is committed to supporting the programmes of the live performance sectors of the Biennale di Venezia.

Like every year, Rai Radio 3 will broadcast the Music Biennale beyond Venice, to growing segments of audience and music lovers, offering live or recorded transmissions of the major events of the 54th International Festival of Contemporary Music.

The programmes of the 54th International Festival of Contemporary Music are available on the Biennale website, www.labiennale.org.


For further information, please contact:
La Biennale di Venezia Press Office
Tel. +39 041 5218886 / 5218776
Fax +39 041 5218843
e-mail: dmtpress@labiennale.org

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