patrikpen: Flooding Venice in Music and Vision 10 November

giovedì 29 dicembre 2016

Flooding Venice in Music and Vision 10 November

Flooding Venice

GIUSEPPE PENNISI reviews the first performance
of Filippo Perocco's opera 'Aquagranda'

On 4 November 2016, the Venice Teatro La Fenice inaugurated the 2016-17 season with a world premiere on the very date of the fiftieth anniversary of a major flood which devastated several areas of Italy. In the international memory, the flood caused most damage in Florence, where the world-renowned Uffizi Museum was full of mud. Several islands of the Venice archipelago were badly hit. Most severely hurt was Pellestrina, now a well appreciated resort with an important polo club, but then inhabited only by three thousand fishermen including their families; almost all of them had to be evacuated.

A scene from Filippo Perocco's opera 'Aquagranda' with all the principals on stage. Photo © 2016 Michele Crosera

In my view, it is important to start the season with a world premiere. It is a mean to remind that music theatre is a live art which keeps in tune with actual developments. It is also a way to stage works by young composers and to attract a new audience, younger than that which normally fills opera houses. I think it is also quite meaningful to celebrate past events with the commission of a new musical work rather than with memorial speeches. La Fenice has a very interesting and rich season with seventeen premieres (four are brand new operas) and seven repertory titles (ie ten performances of La Traviata).

The opera Aquagranda (meaning 'flood' in Venetian dialect) was commissioned to Filippo Perocco, a comparatively young composer, already with considerable international experience. The libretto is partly in verse and partly in prose; it is the joint effort of Roberto Bianchin (a journalist who wrote a book on the event) and of Luigi Cerantola (a Venetian poet and playwright). The stage direction, sets, costumes and lighting are entrusted to Damiano Michieletto and his usual team (Paolo Fantin, Carla Teti and Alessandro Carletti). One of Italy's best-known conductors of contemporary music, Marco Angius, was in the pit. The chorus was directed by Claudio Marino Moretti.

Mirko Guadagnini and extras in Filippo Perocco's opera 'Aquagranda'. Photo © 2016 Michele Crosera

Although the work is called a 'drama in music in one act', the action as such is quite simple. During the opera's eighty minutes, the scant plot revolves around a family that decides, under the influence of its patriarch, not to leave the island but to brave the flood (on the roof of the house) until the weather improves and the water returns to a normal level. In short, the opera is about the fight of men against a natural disaster. By mere chance, its staging occurs at a moment when central Italy is being tormented by earthquakes.

Seven singers were on stage: Andrea Mastroni as Fortunato (the old and strongly willed fisherman), Mirko Guadagnini (as his son Ernesto), Giulia Bolcato (as Ernesto's wife Lilli), Silvia Regazzo (as her friend Leda), Vincenzo Nizzardo (as Nane, a fisherman), William Corrò (another fisherman) and Marcello Nardis as Cester, the carabiniere in service at Pellestrina in the days of the flood. Vocally, declamato and Sprechgesang dominate the score, even though there are duets and trios as well an aria by Lilli bordering on coloratura. Very interestingly, the chorus stands on both sides of the stage on platforms reaching to the orchestra seats, the women on the left and the men on the right. They comment on the events and also take part in them as Pellestrina's populace. Their singing is quite classical (as in Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex) and even goes back to Gregorian style. Chorus master Claudio Marino Moretti does an excellent job in providing the right balance.

All the principals and extras in Filippo Perocco's opera 'Aquagranda'. Photo © 2016 Michele Crosera

The orchestration is fascinating; quite timbric and with a lot of work for percussion, with relatively few instrumentalists, and limited electronic support (to provide stereophonic effects). Under Marco Angius' baton, it delivers the appropriate atmosphere.

I finally deal with the stage direction. Michieleto and his team start by showing a pond at the latter part of the stage; then the full stage is gradually flooded with water from above the set and at curtain calls all the artists have to wear boots. No doubt, an impressive special effect. Few people in the audience noticed that Lilli and Leda's costumes were rather high class, and did not look what fishermen's wives wore in the sixties.