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- The film about Alessandro Stradella, one of the greatest composers of the Baroque period, is based on the music filmed and recorded during the Festival of the Ancient Music Academy of Milan in 2017, as well as the music recorded in July 2018 in Milan by the Ensemble Claudio Astronio, one of the greatest interpreters of Stradella's music. The fictional parts, which stem directly from the music, focus on Alessandro Stradella'dangerous relationships with females, who impacted on his artistic and personal life and caused his premature and tragic death (he was stabbed to death at age 38, a rarity in the history of music). Extraordinary women like Queen Christina of Sweden, a great promoter of music and arts in Rome, or her rival Maria Mancini, another great patron of artists, mistress to the King Louis XIV of France, vied for Alessandro, not only artistically (according to certain popular and literary rumors). There were also famous singers such as Pia Antinori, Barbara Agnadini or Giorgina Cesi, just to name a few, who will be played by singers-actresses, in order to express themselves thanks to Stradella's vocal melodies. Without either sumptuous courts or amazing escapes (although key sequences will not be lacking), the film offers an introspective view, where the characters are almost ghostly, as if they spring from the mind of the protagonist, in spite of their social roles in history The film is thus a psychological investigation of the protagonist, between his restlessness and the purity of his musical compositions.
- Beethoven said that Bach was not a stream but a sea. Bach's music is to a small film like an ocean is to a nutshell: as it cannot be contained in any way, only its abstraction can be grasped. The art of the fugue, without apparent instrumental destination and without a name, is left unfinished by Bach and constitutes, together with the last, in some enigmatic ways, works (The musical offering, the Goldberg Variations, the Canonical Variations ...), a conscious testament for the future, for eternity. Escape, by its musical nature, is a perpetual engine, which has no end, so only an abrupt interruption can end it. Its incompleteness is an indication of its boundless completeness. The thought that is transferred to paper and returns to the mind of the "reader" thus becomes the perfect synthesis of Bach's genius and of the music itself. And as if by magic it can be enclosed in that small vase which is the magic lantern of cinema, where the many events and the many places lived by Bach will also find a place. The other challenge is to lower this musical thought, probably destined only for the keyboard, in the materially and concreteness of the colors of all possible instruments, such as a gigantic keyboard of colors, as if to make it tangibly and overwhelmingly visible to everyone.
- Domenico Scarlatti, the son of Alessandro, was a European musician who, due to familial or existential pressures, cultivated an unusual passion for the musica reservata of the harpsichord, of which he was a great master and with which he won a history-making competition with Handel. His shyness caused him, unlike Alessandro, to forsake becoming a popular figure by performing in theatres. He chose, instead, to spend some forty years teaching the virtuous infanta and future queen of Spain, Maria Barbara of Braganza. His "exercises", intended to be didactic pieces, and were far from the usual compositions for students, and also greatly differed from the music of his day heard in concert halls. The 555 Sonatas (almost 600 at present) neither reflect the conventions of his own time, nor those of the future. They were the result of the legacy that Domenico absorbed from the cultures he came into contact with: Naples, Lusitania, Spain. He created brilliant, atypical forms whose discontinuity and apparent contradiction reveal their originality and extreme modernity. This film is meant to present not so much the biography, as the musical physiognomy (between the surreal and the metaphysical) of a "totally musical" character- for the simple reason that an authentic biographical "body" is missing. The physical places the musician lived in spring from the keys of the harpsichord, magical keys which were precursors for the sounds of modernity, later drawn upon by contemporary composers from various genres, who were inspired by Scarlatti's sonatas to bring his timeless music back to life. Like the places -Naples, Florence, Rome, Venice, Lisbon, Mafra, Seville, Aranjuez, Madrid- later artists, stimulated by Scarlatti's music, also belong to different musical areas and styles. The past comes alive again in the modern era, creating new interest in his music. Places, interpretations, improvisations, compositions, interviews and quotes regard a dozen Sonatas by a great musician who was able to re-invent music, for both his own and our own entertainment.
- Works and life of the Renaissance musician Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, madrigals and uxorious. Carlo Gesualdo: Visionary? Revolutionary? Crazy? S & M? Solipsist? Victim? Weak? Schizophrenic? Persecuted? Cruel? Melancholy? No answer except that of his music, in which these aspects blend seamlessly, such as the overlapping of the counterpoint lines. Music can express madness and, at the same time, harmonize internal disagreements and the world. Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, one of the greatest musicians of the late Renaissance and of all times, grandson of San Carlo Borromeo and Cardinal Alfonso Gesualdo, belonging to one of the most prominent families of the time, was a tormented man, murderer for reasons of honor of his wife and lover, husband in second wedding of Leonora D'Este, excellent musician who spent his time. He survived the death of his two children, died in torment in his sumptuous castle in the mountains of Irpinia, a land that retains in its fiefs the vestiges of the houses that belonged to him. He composed 6 books of 5-voice madrigals and cycles of sacred music (Responsoria and Sacrae Cantiones) which for over four centuries have interested and inspired many composers. Like his biographical story, amplified and colored by popular imagination, which has inspired novels, films, musicals, songs, painters and countless intellectuals from every era. A polyphony of "plots" are counterpointed in the film: first of all the musical one, then the historical, procedural, iconography, musicological, documentary, fiction and popular mythology. (F. L.)