Da Vinci Classics
Giulio Marazia, Orchestra Filarmonica Campana
Physical and Digital Release: 24 November 2017
Oderigi Lusi's Il Nuvolo Innamorato draws on Nâzım Hikmet's tale of a cloud in love, unfolding a musical narrative performed by the Orchestra Filarmonica Campana under Giulio Marazia.
Composer: Oderigi Lusi
Artists: Orchestra Filarmonica Campana · Giulio Marazia, conductor
Catalogue number: C00066
Barcode: 0793597816047
13.67€
Il Nuvolo Innamorato — Ballet in One Act for Orchestra · 8 tracks
Orchestra Filarmonica Campana · Giulio Marazia, conductor. Track timings verified on Spotify and Amazon Music; total duration 45:18.
Conductor and composer Giulio Marazia studied with Gianluigi Gelmetti at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, receiving a major scholarship in 2011.
He has been invited to festivals and concerts in Italy and abroad, appearing at the Teatro Mercadante in Naples; the Piccolo Teatro, Teatro Dal Verme, Auditorium Cariplo and Sala Verdi in Milan; the Teatro Uno in Rome; the Teatro dei Rozzi in Siena; the Auditorium Oscar Niemeyer in Ravello; the Roman amphitheatre in Avella; the Volkshaus in Jena, Germany; and the Opéra Royal de Wallonie in Liège, Belgium. In 2013, the Milan Conservatory selected him to represent the institution in the conducting section of the Premio Nazionale delle Arti, organised by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research and held at the conservatory in L’Aquila.
He has conducted wind orchestras in Chieti, Gioia del Colle, Mercato San Severino and Salerno. From 2006 to 2013, he was musical and artistic director of the Orchestra Sinfonica Ensemble Contemporaneo and the Coro Collegium Vocale Salernitano. With these ensembles he devised and produced annual festivals promoting live classical, symphonic and operatic music.
For the Valle del Sarno Pop Orchestra, he arranged, transcribed and conducted the music for Atom at Night, a concert devoted to Pink Floyd’s best-known works, presented in symphonic arrangements involving more than a hundred musicians. In 2014, he made his debut as guest conductor of Milan’s Orchestra I Pomeriggi Musicali in a series of concerts.
He opened the Milan Conservatory’s 2014–2015 academic year with Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, conducting its choir and orchestra. His appointments have included assistant conductor at the Teatro Verdi in Salerno from 2014, under the artistic direction of Daniel Oren, and at the Opéra Royal de Wallonie from 2015, under Paolo Arrivabeni. In 2015, he made his debut with the Metro Chamber Orchestra in New York in two performances of Bach’s St John Passion, leading to his appointment as principal guest conductor for the 2015–2016 season.
He has worked with orchestras across Europe, including Milan’s Orchestra Giuseppe Verdi, the Sofia Festival Orchestra, the Jena Philharmonic and the choir and orchestra of the opera house in Liège. As musical and artistic director of the Orchestra Filarmonica Campana, he has developed new productions, tours, recordings and audiovisual projects, broadening its national and international activity and its promotion of Italian musical culture. His teaching work has included music education in Milan.
His distinctions include Magnus Taburnus for polyphonic choirs in 2007, as conductor; the St Alphonsus M. de Liguori sacred-music prize in 2009, as composer of Reflections; A Lighthouse Turned Towards the Future in 2010, recognising young people distinguished in work, culture and art; Awards 2010 for his sustained commitment to disseminating and promoting musical culture in the region; and the Premio Cavalierato Giovanile, recognising talent under thirty-five in southern Italy.
The Orchestra Filarmonica Campana was founded in Pagani in 2006 by Giulio Marazia, its musical and artistic director. It brings together experienced professional musicians and young graduates from Italian conservatories. Many of its players combine orchestral work with solo and chamber performances and teaching.
During its first decade, through continuous training, specialisation and more than a hundred concerts, the orchestra developed a committed professional ensemble and an extensive repertoire. Its programmes range from the Baroque period to the twentieth century, from major operatic works to contemporary compositions.
Its principal home has been the Teatro Comunale Sant’Alfonso in Pagani, with regular performances also at the Teatro Diana in Nocera Inferiore and the Mario Ferrante Concert Hall at the Circolo Unione in Pagani. Other appearances have included the Auditorium Oscar Niemeyer in Ravello, the park of the Certosa di Padula, the Roman amphitheatre in Avella, the Teatro Eduardo De Filippo in Agropoli and Villa Guariglia in Vietri sul Mare on the Amalfi Coast.
Oderigi Lusi is an Italian pianist and composer whose music connects classical and contemporary traditions with world music, exploring the sounds of what he calls the “Souths of the World”. His style draws on his pianistic artistry and Neapolitan roots, giving musical expression to a longing for freedom and to a broad range of emotions.
He began his musical studies at an early age at the Domenico Cimarosa Conservatory in Avellino, studying composition and piano and graduating with honours. He has performed as a soloist and chamber musician and participated in national and international competitions and festivals. In 2008, he was admitted to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he studied composition and film scoring while developing his skills in arranging and jazz.
In April 2014, he received a Silver Medal at the Global Music Awards in the United States for the symphonic overture from his ballet The Cloud in Love. In January 2012, he won the Moderato Danzabile National Composition Competition in Rome, devoted to music for ballet. In August 2007, he attended a film-scoring course given by Academy Award winner Luis E. Bacalov at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena.
In 2002, he received the first Bruno Mazzotta scholarship, awarded annually to the best piano graduate of the Domenico Cimarosa Conservatory. At its presentation in the conservatory auditorium, he performed music by Liszt, Schumann and Brahms. He has also won several piano competitions. In 2000, he attended two international courses in musical interpretation and advanced performance with C. Lapegna. During these courses, he performed at the third Fondi Music Festival, the first Sperlonga Music Festival and the Concerti Itineranti series at the Franciscan convent of Santa Caterina d’Alessandria in San Martino Valle Caudina, with programmes including music by Liszt.
A Cloud in Love A Cloud in Love is one of the best-known tales by the Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet. It draws on memories of his childhood, when his grandmother told him old stories, and on his passionate reading of the folklore of his native country. The collection containing the tale, written in the mid-1950s, retains its remarkable beauty and clarity. Hikmet writes of beautiful young girls, comical farmers, wicked wizards and resourceful boys with a simplicity that captivates the reader while preserving the evocative power of his finest love…
A Cloud in Love is one of the best-known tales by the Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet. It draws on memories of his childhood, when his grandmother told him old stories, and on his passionate reading of the folklore of his native country. The collection containing the tale, written in the mid-1950s, retains its remarkable beauty and clarity. Hikmet writes of beautiful young girls, comical farmers, wicked wizards and resourceful boys with a simplicity that captivates the reader while preserving the evocative power of his finest love poetry.
In A Cloud in Love, as in the other tales, poetry takes on the forms of ancient traditions. Its language and images acquire a veil of fantasy, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes ironic, inviting the reader to dream and travel through unfamiliar worlds. Brilliant colours warm the landscape and illuminate the faces and expressions of strong, determined characters. The sky, gardens, animals and the beautiful Aiscé are central to this tale, in which events follow a clear and reassuring order of values and actions. Pure feelings overcome greedy, destructive desires; goodness prevails through moderation and wisdom. Page by page, a story written for children reveals its appeal to adults as well.
Text by Oderigi Lusi.
Once upon a time there was a beautiful young girl named Aiscé. She had long golden hair, a face like the moon and a gentle nature. She lived in an enchanted garden in the Land of the Flute, where the most beautiful flowers in the world bloomed. One day, Seifì the Black, an evil man who owned the entire land except for this small flowering plot, came to the garden gates to force Aiscé to sell him her magical ground, where rare, fragrant flowers grew.
Aiscé firmly rejected his arrogant offer. From that moment, Seifì began to threaten her garden with every kind of calamity, assisted by a thistle transformed into a snake. Who would save the garden from his fury? Who would help Aiscé? A cloud in love, together with the Dove and the Leveret: characters born, like Seifì, Aiscé and the Land of the Flute itself, from the sound of a Dervish’s magical flute. The music rises from the old sage’s instrument, and the story begins.
Text by Giampiero Bellingeri.
Nâzım Hikmet (Thessaloniki, 1902–Moscow, 1963) is a leading figure in modern Turkish poetry. His powerful lyrical voice exposes the injustices committed by those in power, in Turkey and throughout the world. Despite his descent from a family of pashas, governors and notables, his political commitments brought persecution and repeated imprisonment, including the long period from 1938 to 1950. Love and struggle run through all his poetry and prose—poetic collections, epics, plays, novels, critical essays and studies of folk traditions—from his earliest verses onwards. These impulses, transformed into art, are so pervasive that his writing can be understood as a sustained struggle for love: against war and oppression, for peace and affection, and for the deepest and most dramatic expression of human feeling. It carries an intense moral awareness, felt even as physical suffering, concerning art, work, coexistence and existence itself.
To avoid another sentence in his homeland, where his works were banned and he had been officially branded a traitor before his eventual rehabilitation early in this century, Hikmet lived in exile in Moscow from 1951 until his death. From the mid-1950s, in a Soviet capital that both welcomed and constrained him, he reread, rediscovered and reworked the fairy tales of his native land, as though bringing his country closer. Folklorists led by P. N. Boratav were systematically collecting these stories at the time. For Hikmet, every form of literature had its roots and its destination in the fairy tale. He regarded it as the literary genre closest to poetry, through its rhythms, patterns, imagery and brilliant inventions.
In the tale of the Cloud (1962), a fresh world flows from the holes of a flute, carried by the breath of the Dervish, a strange and wise figure detached from worldly possessions. The written narrative provides a brief, animated framework. Hikmet pays homage to humanity’s oldest traditions, in which a divine breath brings the world to life and gives creatures bodies filled with vital air. The expressive tension of the Italian translation likewise seeks to convey the energy and dramatic power of creation, opening the story to pictorial, theatrical and musical interpretations. Love, suffering and struggle unfold through the Cloud’s endless transformations. Perhaps Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian Futurist, was pursuing a related wish for lightness and gentleness, free from masculine coarseness, when he wrote in his celebrated poem: “I will be your Cloud in trousers…”
Here we encounter a desire to tell of renewed creation: of all that repeatedly rises into the air through the breath of life, which fills us, perhaps passing through darkness as it passes through the sections of the flute. The pipe laments its separation from its source, yet it is also the magical instrument that releases sound and calls humanity to reunion. The Cloud sacrifices his life and his very identity. In each transformation, he pours out his spirit and distils his essence through his love for Aiscé. His sacrifice becomes necessary to revive the world, so that the Land of the Flute may become a paradise.
The barrenness of the earth, both outward and inward, had already caused the poet anguish during his travels through Anatolia. He described it in verses published in 1930:
“Bare feet… That is how we travelled through that land! We listened to the sound of stony fields in the watery eyes of old oxen. We saw that the earth yielded no golden ears of grain to black ploughs. We did not travel as in a dream. No, we reached one rubbish heap after another. That is how we travelled through that land. We know what that land longs for. This longing is fashioned like the materialist’s mind…”
On this journey through his country, the young Hikmet felt an ancient unease that would later become a struggle against suffering. He carried it along the subtle, fleeting yet painful path towards redemption: the restoration to the world’s people of a good land capable of yielding golden grain. A garden brought back to life becomes the ground for an artistic recreation, released by a magical pipe:
“Why are you crying, Cloud?” the white dove asked. “Is it because of your pain?”
“No, I am not crying for my own pain, but for Aiscé, whom I love so dearly. I am crying because I shall be separated from her,” the Cloud replied.
Then heavy rain began to pour from him, like water from a glass. In the garden, the flowers raised their little heads, breathed again and recovered their colours. Aiscé dried her tears and pleaded with the sky:
“My little Cloud… I do not want you to die… Please do not die!”
“(…) Soon the Cloud reappeared in the blue sky. As he regained his shape, he looked down at Aiscé and the garden, became a great, generous mouth and smiled. Thus, in the Land of the Flute, the good were rewarded and the wicked punished…”
In these moments of resolution, in the fairy tale’s radiant sense of eternity, we are drawn to the breath itself. We are inspired by the primordial music imagined by Hikmet, played by the Dervish and reworked by Oderigi Lusi.
Original English translation by Fabiana Binarelli; English wording revised.
Orchestra: Orchestra Filarmonica Campana
Conductor: Giulio Marazia
Live recording: 30 August 2013, Circolo Unione, Pagani, Italy
Sound engineering, mixing and editing: Gianni La Marca (Baryton)
Cover artwork: Oderigi Lusi, Il Nuvolo, oil on canvas, 2017
Production, design and art direction: OMK–Da Vinci
Printed with the support of S.P.L.M.
First violins: Giancosimo Smaldone (concertmaster), Ledia Nikolla, Alessia Avagliano, Gaia Arpino, Elena Nunziante, Federico Fabbricatore, Giusy Adiletta, Ilaria Ferrigno
Second violins: Pasquale Murino, Giovanni Rago, Carmela Persico, Andrea Montella, Erica Moffa, Carmine Pennino
Violas: Giulio Piccolo, Pierpaolo Petti, Francesca Scognamiglio, Domenica Centanni
Cellos: Alexandre Petrie Drummond, Sharon Viola, Maria Petrillo, Luana Lombardi
Double basses: Raffaele Sgammato, Luigi Castiello
Harp: Stella Gifuni
Flute: Maria Aiello
Oboe and English horn: Manfredo D’Alessandro
Clarinets: Giovanni Liguori, Giovanni Napolitano
Bass clarinet: Vincenzo Cuomo
Bassoon: Francesco Ausiello
Horns: Antonio Proto, Vincenzo Musone, Giorgio Cardiello
Trumpet: Valerij Ischenko
Trombone: Francesco Fierro
Tuba: Rosario Tramontano
Percussion: Egidio Napolitano, Giorgio Durantino, Pasquale Benincasa, Gabriele Borrelli
Oud: Carmine Terracciano
Guitar: Antonio Saturno
Selected awards, reviews and interviews. Radio broadcasts and podcasts are listed separately below.
MyDreams
“splendide composizioni musicali”
A warmly appreciative interview with Oderigi Lusi about the ballet’s origins in Nâzım Hikmet’s tale and its orchestral language. Published before the CD, it discusses the work and a concert suite rather than reviewing this recording.
Read the interview ↗ - MyDreams
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