Venice binnale di musica 2012
Teatro alle Tese/ Extreme Biennale MusicaEUROPEAN NETWORK OF PERFORMING ARTS
(ENPARTS)
Giovanni Bertelli, AMGD
for five singers and two percussionists
Neue Vocalsolisten
Anja Füsti and Pascal Pons, percussion
Kristiina Helin, Direction for concertante version
HESA/Helsinki Newspaper 17th October 2012
Hannu-Ilari Lampila
“The execution of Giovanni Bertelli’s AMGD work had been deliberately left unfinished, as the singers had not had time to learn their awkward parts. It would have been interesting to see what the work visualized would have been like. Bertell’s grotesque humorous, church-song-raping AMGD is a blatant provocation from a young man: a kind of Fuck you appeal to the Catholic Church, the Italian state and television, as well as contemporary music.”
For the rest, some national newspapers [as manifesto, repubblica] just slammed the entire biennale, and some other [il corriere della sera] just gave a general description of the festival.
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.
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.