SUMMER IN STUTTGART – FESTIVAL FOR NEW MUSIC 2012

Giovanni Bertelli, AMGD
for five singers and two percussionists Theaterhouse Stuttgart July 2012
Teatro alle Tese Venice Biennale
Extreme Biennale Musica, October 2012.
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Neue Vocalsolisten
Anja Füsti and Pascal Pons, percussion
Kristiina Helin & Giovanni Bertelli: Direction
Lotta Esko, Set and Costumedesign
Jan Fedinger, Lightdesign
Borut Peterlin, photos in masks

The Voice and Musical Theatre
Voice, theatre and music are a terrain for experimentation with infinite possibilities and a powerful impact in terms of image and communication: the multiplicity of elements at work, gesture word dramaturgy sound image, can lead to a ‘concerto scenico’, a melodrama, a micro-opera, instrumental theatre, performance, art song, sprechoper. In this field, the Biennale has engaged in an annual commitment with Musik der Jahrhunderte of Stuttgart to produce new experimental chamber music pieces. This year, two thirty-year-olds, Francesca Verunelli, the winner of the Silver Lion at the 2009 Music Biennale, and Giovanni Bertelli will each, separately, stage their first musical theatre work on October 10th at the Teatro alle Tese (8:30 PM). Serial Sevens by Francesca Verunelli is inspired by the dark knots of memory, referring in the title to a real clinical test used to assess the degree of memory and concentration, but also to the 7 voices of the performers and the texts, all of them anonymous, taken from actual conversations between doctors and patients, which open spaces within an unspoken world; AMGD, which stands for “aesthetica more geometrico demonstrata”, and was also an anagram with which musicians of centuries past signed their works and which meant “ad maiorem dei gloriam”, is built with a recurring chain of actions, inspired by a statistic process known as the “Markov chain”, repeated five times, with different variations each time. Equally interesting will be the interpretation of the stage director, who for both works will be Finnish director Kristiina Helin, a long-time student of Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba.