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l'ORLANDO FURIOSO

concept, music and lyrics  Riccardo Marongiu
booklet  Graziella Della Costanza

Any kind of reduction, any exhaustive explanation, any attempt at staging of the Orlando Furioso seems unlikely, to the point that the undertaking appears impossible.

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The quantity of characters, the perpetual pursuit and ramble of events, the myriads of situations in the book follow one another as in a glowing kaleidoscope, in which the same elements are mixed and intertwined each time.

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In summary, it seems that the only way to understand, enjoy and appreciate Orlando is to read it with patience and tenacity, and perhaps aloud in an attempt at acting, which is how it was conceived.

 

Only in this way will it be possible to enjoy situations and the reversals of situations, assonances, hidden rhymes and words that sound like music.

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Yeah, like music ...

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This is my version, deliberately and forcibly limited and partial. Songs in opera form, inspired by medieval and Renaissance musical writing, with a nod to modernity. Songs through which characters chosen in a subjective and arbitrary way, thus, by falling in love, tell their deeds. We have the protagonist Orlando, and then Rinaldo his cousin, first paladins of France, Angelica the beautiful princess of Catai, Ferraù, the Iberian Moor and then Sacripante, Astolfo, Bradamante, Ruggiero and others. And then side figures and strange beings such as the Hippogriff, imaginative crossing of a mare with a bird and the Orca, a killer monster.

Here is a video of the preview

with the salient images.

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Here one of the songs sung by An gelica

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Here the backstage of the dress rehearsal

Asking pardon, I took the license to add two figures to the story: the Jester, a wandering storyteller, super partes commentator, and the Troubadour, a historical court musician.

This colorful team of characters in perennial and iridescent agreement and contrast between them, moves in the most evocative environments described in the book: in Battaglia, in the Woods, on the Island, in the Enchanted Palace, on the Moon.

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Faithful to the Ariostesca track, which has as ingredients love and obsessive mania, physical action and brutality, repetition and magic, I tell the unrequited love of Orlando for the beautiful Angelica, the consequent madness and the lucky one recovery of the sense of the Paladin, moving in the false historical context of Paris besieged by the Moors and their allies, led by Agramante.

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All in the form of an Opera.

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The music is of medieval-Renaissance inspiration, with philological compositional methods based on simplicity.

The recited texts are mine, the scene libretto is by Graziella Della Costanza.

My Orlando Furioso is a work whose staging is similar to that of the tradition

more consolidated, with about ten main characters, the presence of the choir, mimes,

of the extras but with the difference, compared to the Baroque period and later to the Romantic one,

of the music which, being of ancient inspiration, is played by a small group of seven musicians,

neither more nor less what happened at the time in the Courts.

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But here we are using words to describe a work. An extremely difficult undertaking, indeed impossible.

Only direct vision can give the full idea.

We are looking for producers and / or financiers

for the preparation of this Opera.

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We made one

preview with selected songs. 

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