Sunday, December 11, 2016

Milano: Fornasetti - “Il dissoluto punito ossia il Don Giovanni” - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Lorenzo Da Ponte



Photograph by Arianna Sanesi – courtesy Fornasetti

Milano: Fornasetti - “Il dissoluto punito ossia il Don Giovanni” - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Lorenzo Da Ponte. At the Teatro dell’Arte, appropriately inside the Triennale, the design museum, in Milan, the premier of “Il dissoluto punito ossia il Don Giovanni” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte was produced and/with sets by Barnaba Fornasetti. After 229 years since the first performance in Prague, and for the first time in Italy, those original instruments and sounds for which Mozart created his masterpiece were heard once again, fully respecting the greatness of the original score.
Next Performances
Florence – 10-12-13 January 2017
Teatro della Pergola
+ 39 055 0763333

 


“Try to imagine a world without music… you would have the same feeling in a world without decoration.”
Barnaba Fornasetti

  set design courtesy Fornasetti

Don Giovanni – The Sets
The sets are based on classic imagery, reinterpreted in a modern way by Fornasetti. The themes taken from the Fornasetti archives range from playing cards, a symbol of lightness and the eternal unexpected, to the metaphysical room where the characters try to get lost but always return, to the emblematic women’s faces of different identities, a constant and obsessive reminder of the main theme of the work. The extraordinary artistic vision of this opera is thus enhanced and completed, creating a surreal graphic world. Mobile partitions add a fluid rhythm to the rapid progress of the events, evoking a fantastic but also powerful and evocative situation in the absence of a real environment.

Photograph by Ray Tarantino – courtesy Fornasetti


Don Giovanni – The Costumes
The costumes designed by Romeo Gigli reflect the fragility of the characters, outside of space and time, but with all the memory of emotions.

 

Don Giovanni – The Orchestra and The Conductor
The orchestra, Silete Venti! of 30 pieces, conducted by Simone Toni, above, played period instruments, reproducing the original Mozart ensemble: the longitudinal arrangement with the strings opposite the wind instruments contributes to create a sonic and emotional result of great impact, as in the first performances in the 1700s.
The Fortepiano. In keeping with the original score Fornasetti decided to replicate the original fortepiano made by Anton Walter in 1782. The fortepiano is decorated with images from the Fornasetti archives, to create a bridge between the Austrian genius and the modern creative vision of Fornasetti that pervades this project.

 
Don Giovanni – The Libretto

 
Artist Jacopo Foggini with Artistic Director Valeria Manzi

  Set design courtesy Fornasetti


Don Giovanni

Conductor: Simone Toni
Orchestra: Silete Venti!
Project and Set design: Barnaba Fornasetti
Creative direction and Costumes: Romeo Gigli
Director: Davide Montagna
Lights: Gigi Saccomandi
Artistic directors: Valeria Manzi and Roberto Coppolecchia
Producer: Andrea Nannoni

The opera, as proposed by this unusual working group, avoids any attempt to make a customary replica, and conceals a dream that unites a set of artists joined in a trans-creative pact; personalities giving form to a project in which the visions of the individual contribute to generate a single, inseparable subject. Folly and ingenuity are combined with the desire not to amaze, but to simply state their own existence. The goal is not only to engage an audience attracted by the operatic performance as such, but also to appeal to a varied public, through the artistic and intellectual particular that determine the character of the work.