Marcello Filotei - L’ ultima Estate - Rieti

Conductor - Gabriele Bonolis Director - Cesare Scarton Five years have passed since the earthquake that hit central Italy on 24 August 2016, causing the death of hundreds of people and the total destruction of many small towns in the Apennine valleys. No one was insensitive to that tragedy, but it was different to have experienced it personally, as happened to many, many people, including Marcello Filotei, who lost both his parents and many friends and acquaintances that night. He wrote a book about those tragic events, The Last Summer , published in 2019 with the rare gift of an introduction written by Pope Francis. Then, since Filotei is a composer and music is his preferred means of expression, he made an opera from that book. As the composer himself and Vincenzo De Vivo, who gave dramaturgical form to that book, explain, “work” must be understood in the broadest and most general sense of the term, while other definitions, such as the secular Via Crucis , were discarded because they would have been more precise. and stringent and for this very reason they could not exactly correspond to what they intended to do. It could also have been defined as “news in music”, because, although immersed in pain, Filotei’s pen does not put personal feelings into the open – too intimate, too strong, inexpressible – but rather recounts the tragic events he experienced and which speak volumes alone and deeply involve all listeners. It begins with the cold but impressive chronicle of the days and months of her sister’s hospitalization, whose life was hanging on a jumble of tubes and machines, and then moves on, without following a coldly chronological order, to her nocturnal journey by car. from Rome to Pescara del Tronto as soon as he heard about the earthquake, to the memories of his life in that isolated village in the mountains, to the re-enactment – affectionate and, why not? smiling – of some characteristic and also curious characters who populated that little world left out of time, and of the journey through the rubble of the town to reach the pile of debris that was one’s home, ending with the voice of a civil protection volunteer who he says there are people down there, but some don’t answer anymore. Everything is told in the simplest way, up to the last two words: “Hello, mother”. Quoted from