There is a vein of spirituality, an attraction and an attention to the sacred dimension of artistic expression that runs 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 of “Transitus. Il cielo di Francesco”, which the Festival 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 (again at 7.30 pm) in the extraordinary light of the mosaics of the Basilica of San Vitale, entrusted to the voice of the baritone Clemente Antonio Daliotti, to the vocal ensemble Ecce Novum directed by Silvia Biasini and to the instrumental Tempo Primo, together with Andrea Berardi at the harmonium.
Already from the words that complete the title, “The sky of Francis”, one can guess which is the figure at the center of this sacred representation for baritone, male voices, strings and harmonium: it is 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 that is then substantiated in gesture and action, because, as Cristian explains Carrara, “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 with the elaboration of a real sacred representation, recovering a ceremonial made up of symbolic gestures and movements in costume that they 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.
Tickets: single seat 15 Euros, under 18 5 Euros
“Transitus. The sky of Francis”: a new sacred representation for San Vitale