War letters and love poems on the centenary of the Great War
A concert by the DUO ALTERNO for voice, piano, video projections and photo-sounds.The Duo Alterno is considered one of the most significant reference points in the vocal-piano repertoire ranging from the early 20th century to today. Since its debut in Vancouver in 1997 it has taken the best Italian music to 40 countries of 5 continents. Defined by the Washington Post as the Duo “with a big voice and a fine sense of comedic timing” and as a “high theatrics Duo with a strong personality” by the Los Angeles Times, “The Duo that gives voice (and piano) to the Italian twentieth century” by La Repubblica of Rome and as “an electric experience” by the Hindu of Chennai, the Duo Alterno has published 18 CDs. Their experimental research into “foto-musica con foto-suoni” © (“photo-music with photo-sounds”) has also led to six CDs of soundtracks for museums.
1914-2014: À la vie is a project conceived by the Duo Alterno for the centenary of the Great War. It requires a piano, two lecterns, a stereo audio system and a video projector and screen. The programme lasts approximately an hour and ten minutes. It combines music, poems (and, more generally, literary works), and visual works that evoke 1914 in one way or another. The programme opens with the masterpiece L’adieu à la vie, written at the outbreak of the Great War by the composer and pianist Alfredo Casella, born in Turin but educated in Paris. This is a sweet and very intense meditation, lasting over 15 minutes, on touching texts by the Nobel literature laureate Rabindranath Tagore in Andrè Gide’s translation. The piece À la vie, written a hundred years later by Riccardo Piacentini, also from Turin, gives its name to the entire programme extrapolating the latter portion of Casella’s title and re-directing its meaning; it is a homage to two brilliant artists of the early twentieth century, the Russian Kazimir Malevich and the Italian Umberto Boccioni, who in 1914 were working on two of that period’s most iconic figurative pieces: Aviator and Dinamismo di una testa d’uomo (Dynamism of a man’s head). As well as pictorial materials, the piece also uses texts written in the same time-period by Rainer Maria Rilke, and is written for prepared piano, pianist’s voice, video projections and photo-sounds (extracts from the soundscape recorded by the author).
The second part of the programme, returning to Rilke, consists of two pieces dedicated to the Duo Alterno by living composers using texts by the great Austro-Bohemian poet. Here too the point of reference is the Great War, particularly through the dense and multi-faceted Rilke Lieder (in Italian translation) by the Mantuan Adriano Guarnieri, whose texts speak disquietingly of love. These pieces are characterised by an unusually fascinating pictographic structure, whereby the manuscript assumes the appearance of a figurative work which transforms itself into music. They are introduced by a Rilkian lyric by the composer Alberto Colla, from Alessiandria (Italy); this is a piece of impressive transparency with madness as its theme. The performance concludes with the last masterpiece of the greatest Italian vocal chamber music composer, Francesco Paolo Tosti, written in the middle of the War a few weeks before his death.
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