FRANCESCONIANA: I LEGAMI PERICOLOSI

Speranza

I LEGAMI PERICOLOSI: the melodramma

Luca Francesconi’s melodramma“Quartett” is the first Ircam production in the Teatro alla Scala hall in Milan, featuring live electronics.

Participating in the creation of a melodramma, as Donizetti knew, is a challenging experience for musicians.

The computer music design of a lyrical piece (compared to mixed instrumental pieces with live electronics) represents particularities such as strong constraints on means of diffusion and timing.

Producing a melodramma is a multidisciplinary work.

The computer music designer is not the solely collaborating with Franscesconi and this relation is brought to all aspects of creative work: 

stage director

scenography

costumes

video

and singers.

It is not necessarily in the implementation of the melodramma that you’d take the most risk or do innovative work given all constraints. 

However it is a highly gratifying experience when your electronics functions in synergy with all different components, the “Art Total” which is the melodramma, as Wagner would put it.

I LEGAMI PERICOLOSI is an melodramma by Luca Francesconi, commissioned by the famous La Scala hall in Milan. 

It is the first production at Ircam that has ever got through this pretigious hall. 

The opera was performed at the Teatro alla Scala six times between April 26th and May 7th in 2011 with great success and was retaken in Vienna Festwochen in May 2012. 

Enthusiasts saw it again in Paris in March 2012 in Cité de la Musique (concert version) and even later in Europe (Porto, Amesterdam, and Lille, 

The title comes from Heiner Müller’s famous piece as does the libretto, as a duo. 

In the opera the two protagonists are alone on stage during the entire opera (1h20), a soprano and a baritone. 

But it’s also a "quartetto" since they exchange their roles, play other roles and transform: la signora and the signorina (Cecilia).

The stage director fulfilled the difficult task of putting together music, theater and lyrical actions.

The collaboration with IRCAM started in March 2010, (a year ahead of the production). 

The IRCAM work concentrated on the implementation of computer music prototypes to emulate the overall form and preparing sounds, effects and spatial parameters. 

IRCAM tried to focus on the dramatic aspects of electronic sounds.

The first aspect of the work is pre-compositional.

Like many of his counterparts, Luca Francesconi uses computer tools on a daily basis. 

The very first sketches of the opera was a computer sketch, drawing temporal aspects of the grand form of the piece.

During the melorammar, the production team had serious exchanges with the Analysis/Synthesis R&D team at Ircam on the analysis of vocal quality and voice segmentation in order to allow expressive re-synthesis of vocal sounds. 

In the piece, the marchesa di Merteuil and the viscount di Valmont play extreme roles from savagely to intimately refined with great complexity. 

Authorship of these roles require rhetorical vocal characterizations in order to distinguish different roles played by the same actor. 

To this end, we confronted the great traditions of opera with novel vocal transformations in real-time. 

Each actor was associated to various processing schemes but with well-defined characteristics. 

Roles incarnated by singers are represented by vocal transformation characteristics realized by live filtering, transpositions and cross-synthesis by SuperVP for Max modules. 

I LEGAMI PERICOLOSI is a melodramma which is an example of musical research, bringing together both scientific and artistic research within one context.

The two singers in I LEGAMI PERICOLOSI are accompanied by a chorus of 80 singers, two orchestras, and two electronically generated sounds. 

Electronic sounds are either generated live or pre-recorded during studio work.

Part of the orchestra is in a pit, as is the tradition in operas, whereas the rest and the chorus are in a remote hall. 

The two ensembles represent spaces where each actor evolve.

A Claustrophobic Space and an outside world. 

The electronic virtual space follows the same principle. 

The Spat module allows creating multiple coexistence of spaces corresponding to the two situations. 

More precisely, five distinct spaces were employed corresponding to various dramatic situations of the piece:

“Stage” : Natural and direct voice on stage

“Close” : Concertino and claustrophobic , quite dry

“Close-puppet” : Nearfield with mechanical and rhythmical movements

“Dream like” : “outside”, big distance effect, frontal, Far orchestra in virtual acoustics

“Out” : Far orchestra, Traversing the hall, “above audience”

Spat is not used here simply for source deplacement but to create virtual acoustics and move from one to another, corresponding to the evolution of actors in the piece.

From a box, on stage, to cities, to the world. 

This stage effect is essential for relating theatrical means to that of cinematographic and musical representations for the opera.

For the Milan version of the opera, the big orchestra and the chorus, playing in a remote hall, were pre-recorded. 

In live performance, this recording was re-produced and synchronized with a click-track so that the conductor can coordinate orchestra in the pit with recordings.