SPE - 7.30 PM

26 OCTOBER 2019

NOGO Ensemble
La morte stanca, parla
(Tired Death Speaks)

winning project of the open call Of Death and Dying

-

Jacob TV  Grab it!
for electric guitar and audio-video track (1999)

Oliver Messiaen  Louage à l’Immortalité de Jesus,
8th movement of Quatuor pour la fin du temps
for violin and piano (1940)

David Lang  Wed 
for piano (1995)

Franz Schubert  Der Tod und das Mädchen 
for voice and piano (1817)

Franz Schubert  Der Erlkönig
for voice and piano (1815)

David Lang  Death Speaks
for soprano, violin, electric guitar and piano (2013)

NOGO Ensemble
soprano  Patrizia Polia
violin  Filippo Fattorini
electric guitar  Luca Nostro
piano  Lucio Perotti

Views of death, views of death on life. The first part of the concert is dedicated to a reflection on that moment of suspension in which life anticipates death: the prisoners on Death Row in Grab it!; the inmates of Messiaen in the mystical final act of Quatuor pour la fin du temps; the memory of a missing person from Wed.

The second part of the concert will feature songs by David Lang and Franz Schubert. The texts of five “canzoni” by Lang are the result of an assemblage of phrases chosen from Schubert’s thirty two Lieder, in which Death speaks to mortals, indeed Death is a person, and it is this which attracts Lang. As in the two Lieder by Schubert, death comes to life and turns to us with love and compassion, appealing for us not only to not be afraid, but even to go without being called. With the Veil of Maya of individual life removed, death is the true life. Destiny is inescapable, for us the choice is to fight it by attaching ourselves to our short lives, or live according to the revelation that death is, as a limit of each of our lives, universal love and a mystical gateway to the light.

The works chosen for this programme look at the fascination with death, each in their own way, sometimes with restless tonality, sometimes religious and spiritual, sometimes more ecstatic and peaceful, but all of these invite us, whatever our vision and our greater fears, not to dismiss death by expanding a consumeristic and possessive perspective of life, which happens more and more in our society, but to welcome it with love in the rituals of our daily life.