Songs from the frontier: every stone a voice, every voice a story

‘Songs from the House of the Living’, is configured as a melologue capable of combining original music with words, suggestions and emotions that weave a jagged topography of stories collected on a multiple, uncertain and “transgressive” frontier, in the sense that it must be transgressed to acquire profound meaning, since it embraces and intersects life and death, geographies and wanderings, melancholies and laughter.

The small Jewish cemetery of Rožna Dolina (Nova Gorica), just across the border that today delimits two states, tells its own story, evoking ten tombstones that narrate the history and destiny of the people of whom they are the emblem and testimony. In there, in that tiny ‘house of the living’, the plural identity of a complex, wounded and devastated Europe has settled, but also a marvellous example of complex beauty and cultural richness, which still tries to speak to us, to make us understand that all borders are made to be crossed.

Even the one that apparently divides the living from the dead. Music, like words, originates from multiple and heterogeneous sources and is complicated or simplified depending on the ghosts it is called upon to evoke. And of ghosts, this music possesses the heartfelt suspension and impalpable restlessness. The characters that populate the House of the Living have very dissimilar characters and social, human and cultural destinies. In order to narrate them, this allows the use of both cultured and popular musical forms; in particular, some Hebrew songs provide the composition with precious and evocative musical material that will be varied and transfigured in the course of the score.

The aim of the project is also to enhance the important site of the Jewish cemetery of Rožna Dolina, significant not only for the Jewish community that lived in the border area between Italy and former Yugoslavia, but also for Central European culture, still a fundamental cultural glue for a vast portion of Europe.

Opera-Melologue in ten scenes for reciting voices, mezzo-soprano and ensemble.

Music by Carlo Galante.

Text by Angelo Floramo Gaja Filač Matej Zemljič.

Reciting voices Cecilia Bernini.

Mezzo-soprano GO-Borderless Orchestra.

Gabriele Bressan oboe/English horn, Davide Teodoro clarinet/bass clarinet, Ludovica Borsatti accordion, Mojca Batič violin, Barbara Grahor Vovk viola, Vida Furlan cello Conductor Eddi De Nadai.

Event realised within the framework of the Festival Kogojevi dnevi Partner Associazione Progetto Musica, Glasbeno Društvo Nova, Piccolo Teatro Città di Sacile, Associazione Piccolo Opera Festival, Municipality of Gradisca d'Isonzo, Fondazione per i Beni Culturali Ebraici in Italia Support Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, Itas Assicurazioni.