Flauto in scena - Fabbriciani, R. (Monfalcone Teatro comunale, 2007)
Flauto in scena is the eighth issue of Quaderno di Cultura Contemporanea published by the Municipal Theatre of Monfalcone. The ‘red thread of curiosity, of enthusiasm for novelty, for research, for experimentation’, the need to project one's own artistic experiences ‘into a dimension that is always futuristic, far from repetitiveness and boredom’ have guided Roberto Fabbriciani throughout his brilliant career as an innovator of flute technique, which today makes him one of the most sought-after and internationally recognised performers. Fabbriciani, already a guest of the musical season of the Municipal Theatre of Monfalcone, has always had an extremely spontaneous relationship with the music of his time, he loves ‘musical risks’, and finds in the flute, eclectic and multiform, an ‘infinite medium, a subject, an orchestra, a performer that goes beyond its own potential’. Research and the most daring sound experiments on the instrument are, for the author, inseparable from the gesture, the spatial dimension, the movement that accompanies each sound, each interpretative intention. With Flauto in scena, therefore, the author represents with his narration, accompanied by graphic and photographic material and various testimonies by composers who have worked with him, some of his most important experiences in contemporary musical theatre: it is in it, in fact, that a complete artist, always in symbiosis with his instrument, must proceed as actor, narrator and integral part of the dramatic unfolding. The beginning of the volume is dedicated to Fabbriciani's collaboration with Camillo Togni in Blaubart, a one-act opera set in Bluebeard's famous castle, where Fabbriciani, in the role of a child, moves around the stage reciting, with precise rhythmicity, a difficult Sprechgesang in Old German. The text continues with a fascinating description of Luigi Nono's composition of Prometheus. Together with Nono, Fabbriciani experienced closely and very intensely the genesis of a work made up of experiments (technological and otherwise), provocations, new explorations of sound and stage space: a Prometheus that represents the anxiety towards the different, the wandering searching and continually doubting, in which Fabbriciani's curiosity is nourished and finds endless interpretative cues. The story continues with a journey into Sylvano Bussotti's theatre: Fabbriciani explains how his many participations in Bussotti's operaballet productions involved him in ‘pictorial’ musical writing, in new stage situations made of great physicality, of ‘emotional vibrations’ that were different each time. It is with great emotion that Fabbriciani describes, in the next chapter, the profound bond that united him to his maestro, Severino Gazzelloni, and the emotion in participating in the Maderna productions of Hyperion (of which Gazzelloni himself interpreted the unforgettable première in 1964), ‘opera in the form of a spectacle’, in which incomprehension and incommunicability are the protagonists of the alienating subject, and Don Perlimplin, a radio opera based on a text by Garcia Lorca, a ‘triumph of love and imagination’ and a masterpiece of New Music, in which Maderna, who dares to use increasingly complex and difficult linguistic elements, entrusts the flute with the function of ‘enchanting instrument’ that ‘sublimates in the purity of sound the essence of love’. The review of theatrical works ends with Prospero, by Luca Lombardi, where Fabbriciani, who is entrusted with an extremely full-bodied and complex score, interprets the character of Ariel with great charm and magic: the premiere of the opera (Staatstheater, Nuremberg, 2006) was hailed, with great enthusiasm, as the rebirth of Italian opera. The text concludes with a critical essay and an interview by the author, followed by two short testimonies by Sandro Cappelletto and Sylvano Bussotti and a complete presentation of the figure of Fabbriciani through an analysis of his first performances, a brief biography and complete discography.
Keywords: Flute; Music theater; Music philosophy and esthetics; Performance