Alcina: Ermanna Montanari
music: Luigi Ceccarelli
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
At the beginning of the last century two sisters lived in a village in the Romagna countryside not far from Ravenna. The younger was her father’s favourite and he called her “the princess” while the elder was called Alcina: being an enthusiastic reader of Orlando furioso he had named her after the sorceress in the poem who seduces knights and then abandons them, transforming them into dogs, pigs or trees. One day their father left them and nothing more was heard of him. They inherited his job, becoming keepers of the dogs’ home in the heart of the village. One day a young foreigner arrived, said to be extremely handsome. The “princess” fell madly in love with him They were together for some months and then he left as he’d come. And the “princess” went mad. So Alcina decided to stay and look after her sister, closed up in that house which they left only to go and feed the dogs. People said that Alcina, unbeknownst to her sister, had also taken her pleasure with the young foreigner. In Ludovico Ariosto’s renaissance poem Alcina loses all her enchantress’s powers, her ability to seduce and transform men, when she falls in love with Ruggiero. Abandoned by the knight, she is reduced to a tormenting and incurable punishment. She would like to die but cannot because, as Ariosto says, "fairies can never die".
Ouverture Alcina is the superimposing of theses two stories that are linked by the idle turning of amorous fixation. We asked Nevio Spadoni, a poet who writes in Romagnol, to create the canto for our Alcina petrified in pain, lament and malediction, a wild and mysterious language to most ears. And Luigi Ceccarelli, a composer of electro-acoustic music, was asked for a score that could give form to the interior earthquake that rends the sorceress.
Ouverture Alcina is a battle between the power of the voice and of music, an alchemy that draws the figure of the love-wounded sorceress in her iconic immobility, a ghost that howls an untreatable pain. A “canto” in Romagnol dialect, an “ultra-local” language, harsh and archaic, which makes a strongpoint, objective music, of its own incommunicability. The sorceress is alone on stage, moves in the dark, here and there crossed by flashes of light which show her aching body, like that of a butoh dancer, within a sound space orchestrated live by the composer himself. What springs forth is a concert-performance where voice and music form the same stage material. No action, no drama: only the wandering of a vagabond voice, a fabulatory vision in which you can get lost, as in the wrench of dreams.
The term "ouverture" or overture is employed in music chiefly as the introduction to an opera, but in the 19th century it also designated autonomous symphonies such as Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. It’s in this sense that we chose the term, also because of its being suspended and ambiguous between the musical and psychic spheres: “ouverture”, opening, introduction to Alcina’s mental universe, to her headlong whirling.
Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari
Festival des Francophonies en Limousin, Pascal Paradou's podcast interview on RFI
