Friday 29 March at 9.00 pm, in the Church of Sant’Andrea in Trissino (VI), which dominates the town from the hill and overlooks the villa of the historic Counts of these lands, a meditation in music to culturally and spiritually celebrate the evening of Good Friday of the Catholic Christian religion.
At 9.00 pm the beautiful male voices of the Iter Novum choir will sing the Gregorian Lux æterna, which will be counterbalanced by the lightness of the female voices in the same text reread by Sarah Quartel, a young Canadian composer. At this point, in what we hope is an atmosphere of contemplation, Gabriel Fauré’s famous Requiem will find its right place: a smile of the soul towards eternity.
In the words of Fauré himself: «Everything that I managed to take into consideration through religious illusion I put into my Requiem, which is also dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of trust in eternal rest .»
The infinite call and power of the afterlife in the timbre of the horns, the celestial light in the sounds of the harp, the implacability of destiny in the blows of the timpani; and then the genius: a string orchestra without violins, only the dark strings to give the ebony color to eternal rest, and a violin, in the high register, to intone the possible elevation; the organ, a liturgical instrument, cannot be missing, which in Sant’Andrea in Trissino is a wonderful Balbiani Vegezzi-Bossi from 1933, recently restored by Patella.
The pleasure of this performance of the 1893 version of the Requiem – not the drier, liturgical version of 1888, written by the author for the funeral of a friend, nor the concert-like, almost symphonic one that the publisher will have him publish in 1901 – is shared with the already mentioned and appreciated Iter Novum choir, directed and prepared by a young and highly trained Serena Peroni, who will also be a soprano soloist alongside the baritone Alberto Peretti. Mattia Sciortino on the organ is a luxury and a certainty, the Orchestra Giovanile Regionale Filarmonia Veneta is the continuation of an artistic journey.
After the Requiem there will be space for another famous page by the French author, the Cantique de Jean Racine, a hymn to hope: «Word, to the Most High equal, our only hope, eternal light of the earth and of the sky, of the night Don’t worry, let’s break the silence…”. And a hymn to sing, why not, together with the assembly: the delightful “Madre dell’alba” by my friend and esteemed maestro Mario Lanaro, to whom my thanks go.