CARPI The dividing door D. Romeo, AM Ciulla, S. Van Seumeren, A. Salzano, D. Peroni, O. D’Urso, F. Tuccillo, G. Farina, C. Floris regia Giorgio Bongiovanni scenes Andrea Stanisci costumes Clelia De Angelis lights Eva Bruno BARTOK Duke Bluebeard’s castle A. Silvestrelli, I. De Paoli. M. Zacchigna scenes and direction Henning Brockhaus costumes Giancarlo Colis choreography Valentina Escobar Orchestra of the Giuseppe Verdi Lyric Theater Foundation of Trieste, director Marco Angius
Trieste, Theater “G. Verdi”, 14 May 2024
And in the end the production that started with fewer attractions (for those who only frequent the usual suspects) turned out to be a winner. Worthy of a great season finale. Confirming that intelligent routes, less traveled or even unexplored, sometimes reserve the best surprises and reward those who have traced them. The combination proposed by Verdi can be said to be almost textbook, perfect in the element that hinges them: the door or rather the darkness beyond the door, a theme to be combined ad libitum throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Strehler, author of this only booklet, saw it focused on poor Samsa’s door Metamorphosis with all the temptations of the Unrepresentable, which the actor cannot resist. And with La porta dividing Fiorenzo Carpi, the faithful composer of the “Piccolo”, shared the attraction. However, the undertaking already planned and awaited in 1957 would have stalled for other suggestive reasons, despite the prestigious client (De Sabata’s La Scala) and the initial creative impetus. The work would have remained one of the illustrious “unfinished” works and like all unfinished works it would have exercised its own charm, arousing the commitment of Enrico Girardi who relaunched it at the Sperimentale di Spoleto in 2022. Hence now, with a full staff and with the final tableau entrusted to Alessandro Solbiati, the edition was performed with great success in Trieste, a hometown very little frequented by Strehler and even less by Fiorenzo Carpi, a great of the small form and of “functional” music ” to the scene. Carpi’s memory and fortune will perhaps not regain energy from this isolated, excellently crafted operatic performance and will remain linked to masterpieces of the short form of which as a stylistic signature I would at least remember – among the many titles – “Quella cosa in Lombardia”, unforgettable with the voices by Laura Betti and Enzo Jannacci. Hence the listener’s understandable confusion (as Giraldi himself warns) when faced with music that seems to be the daughter or sister of the Darmstadt school and of the almost contemporary Maderna, bristling with atonal striations, sharp sonorities, on which Sprechgesang moves his steps in a disturbing amazement. The main merit lies in the sharp, analytical clarity of Marco Angius’ conducting, in the admirable performance of the orchestra and a lively and well-assorted stage. To the merits of Angius are added those of Giorgio Bongiovanni’s staging, exemplary in its diaphanous scale and articulated gestures with the grotesque features of the three boarders. The obvious problem was to reverse the perspective of the story. The protagonist (obviously off-screen) is on the audience’s side. On this side of that door, with Gregorio, the “repellent different”, we are the spectators of a bourgeois family interior in which every pietas is dried up. And in the end the dead “thing” is thrown away as waste in the “normality” of everyday life. It is certainly difficult for Carpi and the exuberant Strehler to escape from Kafka’s web in the terms of a theatrical piece. Hence the unfinished final picture that Solbiati resolved with a lucid elegy and the suspense of a soundtrack swing. The clarity of Andrea Stanisci’s scenes in Eva Bruno’s vitreous-vaporous lights is beautiful.
Strehler and Carpi’s theatrical performances are as clear and measured as Béla Bartók’s brilliant work is majestic. Duke Bluebeard’s castle which occupied the second part of the evening, exalting the formal rigor of the Hungarian composer and at the same time the immensity of one of the most impressive masterpieces of the twentieth century. Ultimately, even the mystery of Bluebeard – beyond those forbidden doors – and Judith’s desire to reveal belong to one of the great themes of art: the search for identity. The show in Trieste spilled over into the vast crooked cut of a crumbling castle designed by Brockhaus himself (and Giancarlo Colis) with an overabundant visionary richness in the dance visions. To envelop the sensuality that Brockhaus’ direction brings to the foreground with the two protagonists tense in a clash that is also a desperate embrace before the night. And while Angius extracts dramatic tensions and richness of colors and incandescences from the grandiose instrumental ensemble (the Trieste orchestra is still magnificent), on the stage Andrea Silvestrelli and Isabel De Paoli admirably consummate their journey into mystery: he with an imperious interpretation of a humanized giant Nibelungic, she with a radiant and radiant vocal beauty. A truly sensational success.
Gianni Gori
Photo: F. Parenzan
