At the basilica of San Vitale a week of sacred music in homage to San Francesco

Sacred representation for baritone, male voices, strings and harmonium, commissioned to the composer Cristian Carrara

Cristian Carrara

There is a vein of spirituality, an attraction and an attention to the sacred dimension of artistic expression that has always run through the programming of the Ravenna Festival and that in this XXXIII edition takes shape and stage even in moments dedicated to real “Sacred representations”. This is the case with Transitus. The sky of Francescowhich the Festival has commissioned to one of the most interesting composers on the Italian and European scene, Cristian Carrara, and which will debut on Monday 20 June and then be re-proposed every day until Sunday 26 June (always at 19.30) in the Basilica of San Vitale, entrusted to the voice of the baritone Clemente Antonio Daliotti, to the vocal ensemble Ecce Novum conducted by Silvia Biasini and to the instrumental Tempo Primo, together with Andrea Berardi at the harmonium.

Andrea Berardi

Andrea Berardi

At the center of this sacred representation for baritone, male voices, strings and harmonium is the figure of St. Francis. The score unfolds in fact on texts of the Franciscan tradition – from the Legend Maior and from the Legend Minor by Bonaventura da Bagnoregio for the biography and fragments from his many prayers – selected by Cristian Carrara himself to recreate the “transitus”, the moment of the death of the Saint of Assisi. After all, that particular moment is traditionally recalled by a real liturgical office, consisting of a corpus of Gregorian chants which was consolidated immediately after his death and which the Franciscans still sing today. And it is starting from it that Carrara has elaborated its own score, differentiating stylistically and linguistically the “actors” of the representation: on the one hand the Latin of the choir of the friars most linked to the Gregorian model, on the other the vernacular of the protagonist, Francesco, with a new vocal script.

But, also in this case, that sort of Pasolinian karst river emerges, therefore Bachian, which crosses the entire festival billboard: among the “citations” that Carrara has disseminated the musical flow, the choral “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden “That Johann Sebastian Bach (the favorite composer and repeatedly used by Pasolini in his films) inserts in the famous Passion according to Matthew BWV 244. In a game of musical references which then takes the form of gesture and action, because, as Cristian Carrara explains, “my desire was not to produce a score detached from the sacred and devotional context and to be performed in concert, but to integrate musical writing to the elaboration of a real sacred representation, recovering a ceremonial made up of symbolic gestures and movements in costume that could give new life to this liturgy “. Liturgy that will be integrated into the architectural space of one of the most beautiful places in Christianity, precisely the Basilica of San Vitale, using its particular reverberation and exploiting the natural “spatialization” that the arrangement of the voices will allow.

Info and pre-sales: 0544 249244. Tickets: single seat 15 euro, under 18, 5 euro.

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At the basilica of San Vitale a week of sacred music in homage to San Francesco