FULL Dante. L’altre stelle (Bargagna) Pisa 2022 Paola Cigna, Marco Mustaro, Carlo Morini, Renato Raimo
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Dante. L'altre stelle
- Composer: Bargagna Marco
- Libretto: Alberto Casadei original texts and anthological selection
- Venue & Opera Company: Teatro Verdi, Pisa, Italy
- Recorded: May 15, 2022
- Type: Concert Live
- Singers: Paola Cigna, Marco Mustaro, Carlo Morini, Renato Raimo
- Conductor: Stefano Barandoni
- Orchestra: Tuscan Chamber Orchestra
- Chorus: Coro dell'Università di Pisa
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: Coro dell'Università di Pisa
- Date Published: 2023
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: yessubs, itsubs, gensubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
2021 was the seventh centenary of Dante Alighieri’s death, who died in Ravenna on the night between 13 and 14 September 1321. To celebrate the great poet, a year earlier, in January 2020, a group was formed at the University of Pisa of writers and musicians formed by Alberto Casadei and Fabrizio Cigni, professors of the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics, Maria Antonella Galanti, head of the Polo Musicale, Alessandra Lischi, delegate of the Rector for communication and dissemination of culture, and Stefano Barandoni, director of the university choir.
The idea was to solemnize the anniversary with a new musical composition on Dante: a large oratorio for soloists, choir and orchestra to be presented in Pisa in 2021 in world premiere. The drafting of the libretto was entrusted to Alberto Casadei, professor of Italian literature, while the music was commissioned to Marco Bargagna, a Pisan composer, professor at the Luigi Cherubini Conservatory in Florence.
The project, sponsored by the municipality of Pisa and the Tuscany region, was positively received by the National Committee for Dantesque Celebrations, which included the musical event in the calendar of events promoted by the Ministry of Culture.
Initially scheduled for May 2021, the first performance of the oratory had to be postponed several times due to the Covid-19 pandemic: first to November 2021 and then to this spring 2022 due to the persistence, last autumn, of the prescriptions against – contagion which, by reducing the capacity of the theater stages, did not allow the simultaneous presence of an orchestra and a choir of over one hundred elements.
No less difficult was the preparation of the oratorio by the choristers, forced to a long period of online connections, in which Maestro Barandoni taught the parts without however being able to verify their learning. Then during the summer of 2021 face-to-face rehearsals resumed, albeit in a very limited form: only outdoors and only in separate sections, to avoid gatherings. When finally, in the autumn months, the vaccination campaign made it possible to start rehearsing all together again, the choir concentrated on preparing the Christmas concert, the long-awaited annual appointment with the citizens of Pisa, obviously characterized by a completely different and for which the presence on stage of a piano was sufficient. The study and rehearsals of the Dante oratory. The other stars resumed at full speed last January and tonight – exactly one year after the appointment that was originally budgeted – we are all here, to offer you this unpublished work. The only thing missing is Maria Antonella Galanti, who was a member of the working group promoting this event, who directed the University music center (named after her after her death) with great competence and contagious enthusiasm, who sang in the choir with her beautiful soprano voice and which an inexorable and very rapid illness took away less than a year ago: but which tonight we like to imagine among the “other stars” sung by Dante.
by Maria Letizia Gualandi, Head of the Polo Musicale ‘Maria Antonella Galanti’, University of Pisa