© Luca Concas
Dante Vespers
Eunoè
Earthly Paradise
Oratorio in four parts for soloists, choir, instruments, and narrator
music by Stefano Dalfovo
libretto curated by Francesco di Giorgio
Ecce Novum
conductor Silvia Biasini
world premiere
A bespoke oratorio for the Cesena-based Ecce Novum choir, on a libretto by Francesco Di Giorgio where the last seven Cantos of Purgatorioare intertwined with the Vulgate, the Aeneid, T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land, as well as verses by Ungaretti and Montale, or reminiscences from the novels and short stories by Conrad, Hemingway, Celati, Bufalino, Guimarães Rosa… The libretto narrates the moment when Virgil disappears and Dante meets Beatrice, who reproves him for his past mistakes and invites him to bathe in the rivers Lethe and Eunoè. The present pervades the past as the past invades the present, as in Stefano Dalfovo’s score. The young composer builds his soundscape as an alternation of Gregorian chant and counterpoint, accommodating multilingualism with oscillations between modality, tonality and atonality.
