Orchestra Polifonico Flegreo
Orchestra “F. Veniero”
Orchestra Partenopea di S. Chiara
Conductor: Nicola Capano
Valeria Attianese: Soprano
Annamaria Napolitano: Mezzo Soprano
Armando Valentino: Tenor
Sergio Valentino: Bass
After a sadly music-less but reasonably fun-filled month of October that, among other things, saw my return to the beautiful-in-a-gritty-way city of Naples, I decided to take matters into my own hands and get down to work. Therefore, as soon as I was kind of settled down, I started hunting down any opportunity to hear live music—preferably performed by local artists because, why not?—, including one that had been pointed out to me a couple of months earlier by my Napolitan friend Vittorio.
Fact is, by the time I arrived, the concert of Mozart’s timeless Requiem was advertised on countless posters popping up all over the city, so it would have been hard to miss. And it certainly would have been a shame too, because not only is it one of the first works that decisively turned me into a classical music buff, but the performance was also going to take place in the Chiesa di Santa Maria La Nova, a major but still relatively unknown church of the historic center we had never gotten around to checking out.
So that’s where we went last Sunday evening, for the totally civilized starting time of 7:00 PM, despite my deep-rooted reluctance to get even remotely close to the overcrowded and over-chaotic via Toledo on the weekends. The prospect was simply too exciting to pass on for us and, we soon came to realize, for many other people too, considering the line that had already formed when we prudently arrived at the church almost an hour early.
After overcoming a couple of human and technical obstacles, such as a determined line cutter that I gladly blocked and a fickle ticket-scanning app that the usher ended up disregarding, we walked into the vast, long and magnificent church that was slowly filling up and would reach capacity, an impressive and heart-warming feat. Even better, the originally rebuffed line cutter, who had managed to sneak into the reserved section, got rightly sent to the faraway back of the church, where the otherwise good acoustics had to be rather awful. Ain’t poetic justice sweet when it hit the right spot?
The event started with a reading by movie and performance director Riccardo Canessa of Mozart and Salieri, Russian writer Alexander Pushkin’s short play that would inspire English playwright Peter Shaffer to write his Tony Award-winning play “Amadeus”, which Czech-American film director Milos Forman would later turn into his Oscar-winning movie by the same name. The reading was fine, mostly because it lasted barely a half-hour. And then, musicians and singers finally took their places for the eagerly awaited musical part of our evening.
And I am happy to confirm that our patience was amply rewarded with a stupendous performance in the stupendous setting, the kind of glorious experience that makes you wonder if there could be a God after all. Of course, it remains to be seen how many audience members actually appreciated it at the level it deserved, including the older gentleman in front of me who kept busy filming snippets of the concert on his phone before posting them on his Facebook page.
The rest of us who were there for the music had a swell time though. My two favorite parts, Requiem Aeternam and Lacrimosa, came out hauntingly beautiful as they poignantly evoked the plea for mercy and the hope for eternal rest that are likely to arise when approaching the pearly gates. But orchestra and chorus also knew when to pack a resounding punch, as they brilliantly demonstrated during Kyrie, Dies Irae and Rex. Not to be outdone, the four highly capable soloists stood out with the perfect combination of force and nuance, and splendidly contributed to this thrilling Requiem. My Italian season has started well.
