2022
PSLN wants to be a hymn to life. After all, we are talking about the centenary of the birth, of the coming into the world of a complete artist like Pasolini. I wanted to do the author justice not by using lengthy recognised extracts, but rather by minimising the quantity of writing fragments. PSLN aims to be a Listening Theatre where the thousands of pages of PPP‘s impressive oeuvre are distilled into a microcosm that can conjure something much larger precisely because of their paradoxical reduction.
Thinking back, the collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Morton Feldman was an inspiration to me. In 1976, months after discussing the playwright‘s difficulty in writing operas, Beckett sent a postcards to Feldman. On the back was a handwritten text of ten lines, eighty-seven words penned in his famously scrawling handwriting. Nothing else, just a short note: ‘Dear Morton Feldman. Verso the piece I promised. It was good meeting you. Best. Samuel Beckett.’ A year later from that libretto Feldman composed the opera Neither, lasting about an hour. PSLN thus reduced the script to a short poem from Pasolini‘s youth, and the ensemble’s work, the space and its characteristics, making the most of the acoustic possibilities of the environment. A strong echo in the performance venue, for example, permits a ‘cantar lontano‘ where instruments and voices are spatially separated. This is an atmospheric and minimalist approach to composition that places the audience at the centre of the space to experience the ebbs and flows of sound. A project in which the relationship between new music, early music, and sonic space unfolds in sections that at times evoke abstract madrigals. Together with the instruments and solo voices, PSLN has developed a special bond with the amateur choir Corale Poliziana, directed by Judy Diodato. This relationship made it possible to compose a piece through close collaboration, working directly with the choir’s unique characteristics. The choir becomes the protagonist.
– RPD
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