Concert for voice and video prepared piano. Bernardo Strozzi: Beyond Caravaggio
The concert Bernardo Strozzi: Beyond Caravaggio, a concert for voice and prepared piano with video, will feature the video projection of images printed on different types of paper and cut into regular modules, as if they were mosaic tiles, positioned on the piano strings. During the musical performances, the same images will come to life, and then be broken down and transformed. Images of masterpieces by Bernardo Strozzi and Caravaggio will be positioned on the strings.
Camilla Lopez: voice (Italy)
Matteo Ramon Arevalos: video-piano and composition (Italy)
Concert ticket includes short tour of the exhibition Bernardo Strozzi: Beyond Caravaggio. Curators and guides will make short tours in Estonian, English and Russian.
Tickets 25/20 €, available at Fienta.ee and one hour before the concert in the museum ticket office
Concert is supported by the Italian Embassy in Tallinn
The first and second parts of the concert were inspired by the portrait Bernardo Strozzi made of Barbara Strozzi, a famous Venetian singer and composer of the early 17th century.
For the occasion, a special transcription has been created, Invocation to the Muse for Barbara Strozzi, from the ancient Greek melody Invocation to the Muse, imagining Barbara Strozzi as a muse. Before the concert, the printed cardboard image of the reproduction of Barbara Strozzi’s portrait will be placed on the piano’s strings, cut out in a mosaic as if to form an image that will be broken down during the first and second pieces with the playing of the piano music. This image, increasingly fragmented, will accompany the second part, Bernardo Strozzi called the Cappuccino: Trial of 1625, in which the text of the interrogation of Bernardo Strozzi in 1625 will be used and set to music, where the accusations made against him were related to his paintings that did not conform to his status as a clergyman.
The third and fourth parts are a musical tribute to the Nativity by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, commissioned from the Lopez & Arevalos duo by Anna Capra of the Archeoclub Sicilia ODV of Palermo.
In Cum figuris (the third part), the text of the contract between Fabio De Nutis and Caravaggio was used and set to music. This time, a reproduction of the original contract on parchment paper will be placed on the piano strings.
In the fourth movement, Judicial Interrogation of Caravaggio 1603, part of the text extracted from the interrogation of Caravaggio in 1603 for defamation charges will be set to music, from which touching reflections on art will emerge. In this case, a copy of the document of Caravaggio’s subsequent arrest in 1605 will be placed on the strings.
The fifth movement is an intermezzo for solo piano, Intermezzo: Elogio della follia creatrice, a tribute to creative madness. The composition is based on the theme of the Follia di Spagna, published by the Estonian label Tunitemusic in 2023. A copy of the painting Concert by Bernardo Strozzi’s workshop will be placed on the strings.
The sixth part, an evocative mantra entitled Mantra Bernardo Strozzi: Beyond Caravaggio, is dedicated to the protagonists of the exhibition, Strozzi and Caravaggio. On the strings this time will be placed the Nativity with Saints Lawrence and Francis of Assisi by Caravaggio and the Nativity and Adoration of the Shepherds by Bernardo Strozzi.
Programme
Invocation to the Muse for Barbara Strozzi, (5’)
for voice and piano
Bernardo Strozzi Called the Cappuccino: Trial of 1625, (5’)
for voice and piano
Caravaggio: Cum figuris, (7’)
for voice and piano
Judicial Interrogation of Caravaggio 1603, (7’30’’)
for voice and piano
Intermezzo: Tribute to Creative Madness, (5’)
for piano
Mantra Bernardo Strozzi: Beyond Caravaggio, (14’)
for voice and piano
Camilla Lopez (voice and percussion) graduated in 2016 as an actress at the Carlo Goldoni Academy in Venice.
Over the years she has enriched her academic path with seminars and meetings that are important for her training. Her theatre career began in 2004, at the Ravenna companies Teatro delle Albe and Fanny & Alexander. In 2009 she founded the company Fuochi, together with Alice Merenda Somma, with whom she created several shows, including Amabo te, which debuted at the Santarcangelo41 Festival in 2011. Since 2017 she has been an actress in the historic puppet theatre company Drammatico Vegetale. Between 2019 and 2021 she was an actress in Nerval Teatro for the show Le Lacrime amare di Petra Von Kant, which debuted at the Teatro Astra in Turin in July 2021.
Since 2018 she has undertaken a musical journey with the musician Matteo Ramon Arevalos, as part of the voice and piano duo Lopez & Arevalos.
She is a singer in the Europa Suite quintet formation for voice, piano, violin, guitar and flute.
Matteo Ramon Arevalos (piano, percussion and compositions) studied piano at the Bruno Maderna Conservatory in Cesena and graduated with top honours, subsequently perfecting his skills with Rudolf Kehrer in Vienna and with Oxana Yablonskaya in New York. As a concert pianist, he has collaborated with the theatre companies Fanny & Alexander, Masque Teatro, Nerval Teatro and recently with the Societas Claudia Castellucci. He has released three CDs on the ReR Megacorp label, Messiaen et autour de Messiaen (2008), Sérimpie (2013) and Per Piano (2017) with works by Fausto Razzi. As a composer he collaborated with the director Elisabetta Sgarbi on the soundtrack of her film Raffaello – La Stanza della Segnatura (2010) and with the director Hanspeter Ammann on the film Late Penang Afternoon (2017). He has published two of his piano compositions for College Music: Vivo Marcia Fantasia (2002) and Nocturne 1996 (2006). In 2017, the Centro Dantesco di Ravenna and the Ensemble Mosaici Sonori commissioned him to compose an Oratorio, Dante: un viaggio nella Comédia, for choir, orchestra and two narrators on the occasion of Dante celebrations. For the historic puppet theatre company Drammatico Vegetale he composed the music for Leo. Uno sguardo bambino sul mondo (2019), on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Leonardo Da Vinci, and InfernoParadiso (2021), for the Dante celebrations. In 2023, the Italian Cultural Institutes commissioned from him a quintet for voice, flute, violin, guitar and piano entitled Europa Suite, dedicated to people who suffer in wars. He is currently engaged in a duet with Camilla Lopez, Tributo a Violeta Parra, Cielito Lindo and Teleion – Fragments of Ancient Greek Music, of which a CD was produced by the Estonian label Tunitemusic and which was nominated for the best CD of 2024. Memento Caravaggio and Serpotta Veritas were commissioned by the Archeoclub Sicilia ODV, and in concerts he has served as a soloist in performances of his compositions for piano and for video-prepared piano: La Folia and Metamorphosis.
