FULL C’era due volte il Barone Lamberto (Alberto Cara) Novara 2023 Marco Bussi, Eleonora Filipponi, Davide Lando
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: C’era due volte il Barone Lamberto
- Composer: Cara Alberto
- Libretto: Alberto Mattioli based on Gianni Rodari Libretto Text, Libretto Index
- Venue & Opera Company: Teatro Coccia di Novara, Italy
- Recorded: March 19, 2023
- Type: Staged Opera Live
- Singers: Marco Bussi, Eleonora Filipponi, Davide Lando, Alberto Yuri Guerra, Haruo Kawakami
- Conductor: Marco Alibrando
- Orchestra:
- Stage Director: Gianmaria Aliverta, Francesca Donati
- Stage Designer: Gianmaria Aliverta
- Costume Designer: Sara Marcucci
- Lighting Designer: Ivan Pastrovicchio
Information about the Recording
- Published by: Voce AllOpera
- Date Published: 2023
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: nosubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
“There was twice Baron Lamberto* is a rather unusual work for its author: it is a story in which pedagogy apparently (only apparently) enters little, and in which it is difficult to find a moral. Everything remains on the surface, like a drawing of a cloud of smoke, impossible to grasp.
Yet the dramaturgical content of this divertissement seems concrete and evident to me: the characters, stereotypes in form, acquire reality and body in the writing, all seasoned with that subtle ambiguity which is perhaps indispensable in a story to be set to music, because music requires of unsaid, of narrative gray areas in which to sneak in with the aim of clarifying or, if needed, to accentuate the sense of uncertainty. And therefore: is Lamberto, the Baron, really in love with the Voice? Or is it the whim of a “man who must never ask”? And the butler Anselmo? Is his behavior dictated by a “service ethic”, or by cowardly servility? Are bandits evil or just stupid? Everyone moves between hypocrisy and truth, between calculation and feeling, and it seems to me that the figure of the story is precisely this: the desire to confuse the waters; not to be, as always happens to this author in his works openly dedicated to children, rightly on the side of good. Rodari seems to be telling us: “this is how the world goes, gentlemen, and mind you: I am revealing a hidden truth to you, facts that seem incredible, but which are not”. And what would (and here I return to the beginning of my speech) be this will to unveiling, if not a pedagogical intention, even if hidden in the folds of the absurd? A pedagogy for adults and, perhaps for this reason, devoid of that sweet and cheerful hope that the author openly manifests when he addresses children: the story of life as it is, absurd yet true, which breaks down rhetoric and lays bare the dialectic of feelings, desires, and the actions they move. Avarice, rapacity, love, tenderness, fidelity, calculation, death, rebirth, mystery. There is a bit of all of this inside Lamberto!
The libretto by Alberto Mattioli returns a polysemic reading of the story, suspended between the sly register of light comedy and a sometimes even crude realism; as for me and my music, we try to skate between characters and situations enjoying this plurality, to guide the action by sliding between the various levels of drama in a fluid way, and to gradually transform comedy into tragedy, and vice versa”.
Alberto Cara