This is the story of a Befana devoted to kindness.
A musical fairy tale.
A moment for young listeners.
An opportunity for anyone who has ten minutes to spare and wants to return to childhood.
The plot?
Only the Befana would risk her life for one or two mosquitoes.
This project was born from an encounter with Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, a book that does not describe places, but states of mind, fragile balances, and unseen connections. The cities that Marco Polo recounts to Kublai Khan do not reveal themselves at a glance: they exist in the tension between presence and absence, between memory and imagination.
I chose to wander through some of these cities — Ottavia,
Valandra, Bauci, and Ersilia — translating their abstraction into sound. Music
becomes an ethereal thread, an intangible sketch that seeks not to render the
shape of the cities, but their very essence: suspension, connection, distance,
reflection. Ottavia is fragile equilibrium, life suspended on a net that can
hold only so far.
Valandra is the double, a mirrored city, the unresolved dialogue between what
is and what appears.
Here, sound does not illustrate; it hints. It builds invisible, suspended, unstable spaces.
Bauci is the
distant gaze, the observation of the world from a high vantage point, a
contemplation of one’s own absence.
Ersilia is the weave of human relations, threads entwined until letting go and
being reborn elsewhere becomes inevitable.
Music becomes
a place to inhabit, if only temporarily, like Calvino’s cities, inviting the
listener to traverse these inner landscapes and complete their meaning through
their own experience.
Scritti nel ridente paese di Induno Olona, che mi ha dato e ancora mi dà i
natali, questi tre Studi per fagotto nascono
uno dopo l’altro al civico 62 della via che dalla cappelletta conduce alla
chiesa.
Sono tre pagine didattiche che sviluppano temi in forma libera di rondò: un
pretesto per giustificare il tempo trascorso nel piacere di scarabocchiare sul
pentagramma e di suonarne il disegno.
Così, a Induno Olona, c’è chi se la suona e se la canta.
Ai pochi curiosi che avranno voglia di ascoltarli porgo la mia gratitudine — e
le mie scuse.
When his mother saw him come home crying, leaving his
playmates behind, she immediately realised that fate had played a cruel joke on
her little Friedrich. With his hand over his right eye, he blocked out the pain
that left him blind forever. But while fate takes away, it also gives. Thus, in
little Friedrich Kuhlau, born seven years earlier in 1786, a passion for music
grew stronger. He eagerly awaited his father's return from the military band to
introduce him to the magical world of music. His talent soon became apparent
and in Hamburg, where they had moved, his father hired private piano and theory
teachers for him. At the age of twenty, Kuhlau began composing works for piano
and songs. Meanwhile, Napoleon's forces were advancing across Europe and, to avoid
conscription into the French army, he took refuge in Copenhagen, where he
quickly obtained Danish citizenship. Although not Danish by birth, Kuhlau
embraced his adopted country and became a central figure in its cultural scene.
In 1825, he met Beethoven in Vienna
and was struck by him. They roamed around Vienna celebrating their friendship
made of music and wine. He was called the “Beethoven of the flute” because of
his numerous and significant compositions dedicated to this instrument. In
1831, a year before his death, fate played another cruel joke on him. He set fire to his house,
destroying many of his manuscripts. He passed away at the age of forty-five,
winking at fate, which, as an inseparable part of life, loves music among other
things. The Fantasies Op. 38 for solo flute, published in 1822 by C.F. Peters,
use arias borrowed from Mozart's Don Giovanni and, in the case of the third
fantasia, from the aria “Deh, vieni alla finestra”. I propose the last of the
“Three Fantasies Op. 38” published in 1980 by Nova in the transposition for
bassoon or cello edited by R.P. Block.
