Also from Jingo is a DVD film telling Verdi's life story. The title, Fly Thoughts, On Golden Wings, is taken from a famous chorus in his opera Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar). Known as the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves and beginning "Va, pensiero" (Go, thoughts), it became a virtual anthem for Italy's unification movement, the Risorgimento. It was considered Verdi's personal signature, and was sung by the 300,000 people who lined the streets at his funeral in Milan in 1901.
Here the US baritone Thomas Hampson provides the narration and sings half a dozen arias while standing in historic settings associated with Verdi's life. You learn about his relatively humble origins, his lifelong love of the featureless local countryside where he was born, his ambiguous attitude to Paris, his long relationship with Giuseppina Strepponi (who he lived with for over a decade before marrying) and some of his numerous successes. This, though necessarily brief, is an appropriate introduction to Verdi for all newcomers to his art.
Saint Sebastian, pierced to death with arrows, served for long as a secret gay icon, a symbolism resurrected in 1976 by Derek Jarman in his cult film Sebastiane. Gabriele D'Annunzio's text for Debussy's Martyrdom of St Sebastian (1911) was actually put on the Index of banned works by the Vatican. Since then the "sacred mystery play" has been largely neglected, and it's good to see a selection from it resurrected in concert form at the Lucerne 2003 Festival. The music is by turns eerie and lugubrious, it's atmospherically played by the Lucerne Festival Orchestra under Claudio Abbado, and the recorded sound-quality is excellent.
Debussy's well-known symphonic poem La Mer completes the program.
RSS