Il Ritmo della Terra ('The Rhythm of the Earth') is a chamber opera. The music, as it develops, takes the listener on a journey back to a spring-like state, a state of purity. The earth's needs, as well as our own, are rapidly changing and a suspension in time is necessary for an introspective dialogue before we can return to ourselves, to our connection with nature and the animal world. Mariangela Gualtieri's texts are precious gifts, reflections and reminiscences that lead the listener on his or her own journey.
This work leads us back to listen to ourselves, to observe and almost transcend the rational semblance of things and the boundaries of the individual psyche. To feel one's own rhythm, and that of our surroundings. The search for beauty in the observation of a detail, of being able to listen to our own needs and to nature through moments of passion and boundless prayers, reason and instinct, beauty and pain, human and animal. The subject matter is universal and concerns each of us everywhere in our own personal depths.
Il Ritmo della Terra is a work that can involve everyone, beginning with the youngest generations who have great sensitivity and innate respect for these themes, and it offers a means of reflecting on these topics.
With this work, commissioned by Simone Rubino (with the support of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust), I wanted to give expression to his incredible vocal skill, the manifestation of a dynamic musicality. His distinctive voice immediately made me think of bel canto and what it can still offer today to a modern audience when merged with our contemporaneity and its infinite sources of inspiration.
His vocal agility and lightness, combined with an amazing instrumental technique, provided me with an enormous expressive possibility for my compositional process. In writing this piece, I wanted to make a string ensemble, percussion instruments and harpsichord co-exist in dialogue with an archaic-sounding vocalism and a very modern instrument like the vibraphone. This meeting of sonorities, poised between the ancient and the modern, was the perfect way to create a work that could also respond to the demands of the text.
The chamber opera that I developed around Mariangela Gualtieri's texts is a true dialogue, which the protagonist conducts with himself and with the natural reflections that come from the observation of himself and the nature that surrounds him.
