Il laboratorio delle idee

24th February – 24th May 2016

Luca Ronconi debuts at La Scala theatre in 1974  and scandal it was: his Valchiria, transposed in the  mythology of the middle class family of the eight hundredth  forerunning the similar action of  Chéreau in Bayreuth , shocks the audience and the  conductor himself Wolfgang Sawallisch: more  turmoil is met by his Don Carlo deprived of its usual  lavish pageantry and loaded with symbols of doom  and gloom, being attuned with the musical  research that Abbado was carrying on. 

Performances which now belong to legend and followed, in the 80s by two days of Licht cycle by  Stockhausen to open a sort of path where titles  from the greatest repertoire (altogether Ronconi  was entrusted to open six seasons) are mingled  with less known or totally unknown without  respecting any hierarchy. Ronconiʼs reckoning of an opera is a work focusing on tradition: a common  past that even when it is deconstructed remains as  a code shared between the artist and the audience. 

The poetic and musical written work is sifted through by an ironical rational thought, pitiless but  also open to tenderness. The huge Ronconian  machinery comes to life, the columns of Troyens,  the mobile architectures of Fetonte, the heap of  huge ruins in Aida and hence a plural idea of space  takes place, dense with different points of view. 

Ronconiʼs habit to conceive his works starting from the plan, in architectural terms before the visual  ones, displays the technical and expressive  potentials of the scenes built as to imitate in three  dimensions the aesthetic of the pageants. The view  from above on the soldiers marching in The  damnation of Faust, the table set in vertical of the  Tale of Zar Saltan, the castle glanced from down in  the valley in Lodoïska, SantʼAndrea della Valle  deconstructed in a sort of kaleidoscopic vision in  Tosca, compel the audience to renounce the habit  to a front vision of a performance, while the new  technology offers the shooting of Guglielmo Tell or  the field invasions like the attack to the royal box  in Orfeo or the merry parade in Il viaggio a Reims  complete the work of disorientation. The cynical  and disenchanted clearness of mind, the  temptation of a smile or a prank, do not contradict  but make more moving the touches of  romanticism, also it ironic but shameless at the  same time, like the spray of roses in Damnation,  the plunge in the void of the lovers in Lodoiska,  Ariadne suspended above the Island of the dead  and the desolation of the statue of the Vergin on  the ground in Suor Angelica.