July 6, 2019 19:00
PARC Performing Arts Research Centre Firenze | IT
At the end of a residency period in the spaces of the PARC, the Compagnia Simona Bucci presents a first study of Preludi e Fughe, commissioned by the Stresa Festival, with will debut on August 30, 2019.
Dmitri Shostakovich is one of the most inspired and peculiar voices among twentieth-century composers. He has demonstrated how it is possible to compose music of profound originality and poetic independence, skilfully dosing sarcasm, irony, mockery, in an atmosphere that is often enchanted and unreal.
The 24 Preludes and Fugues op. 87 (1950-51) are Shostakovich’s opus magnum and have left a profound mark on the 20th-century piano repertoire. Written in an essentially traditional language, often derived directly from Bach’s examples (in particular from the 48 Preludes and Fugues of the well-tempered Harpsichord), they still sound extremely modern today. Emotional contents are based not so much on intrinsic musical ideas, but above all on “metamusical” references, that is on pre-existing styles and models that the piano is perfectly able to bring back to the listener’s memory.
This mechanism allows Shostakovich to adopt a complex symbology, often linked to arcane and esoteric worlds, to render atmospheres of great intensity, in which the grotesque and the tragic, mysticism and the sneer merge.
[Roberto Prosseda]
The atmospheres of Shostakovich’s music evoke places of being, states of shadow, yearnings, but also games, lightness and dreams. Emotional panoramas, textures and pieces of a unity of multiplicity. Seven male presences share a space and a time with music, in the constant relentless change of becoming. Witnesses of fragments of reality distilled from experience and individual nature. Gestures find identity and definition from the observation and analysis of the original forms of the experiences of the individual and the community. Identities established but ready to deny themselves in favor of change, placing thoughts and cultivating doubts rather than certainties.
[Simona Bucci]