Oscar Bianchi

PARTENDO

commissioned by Festival les Amplitudes - with support of Pro-Helvetia and Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain, Uusinta Ensemble Helsinki and Studio for New Music Moscow.

a modular work of Oscar Bianchi

PARTENDO has been conceived as a modular piece. In its non-staged form it consists on a piece of music of approximately 25 minutes. The staged version, which will be premiered at Meyerhold Theatre in Moscow on the 28 of November 2015, will amount to approximately 45 minutes and will involve nine musicians, one countertenor and one performer.  The staged version will be realised in collaboration with multidisciplinary performer Nile Koetting and dramaturg Marlene Kolatschny.

The central topic of this work is ‘leaving’ (‘’partendo’’ is the Italian word for ‘leaving’ ). How do we leave existing physical and intellectual places, and relatedly how can we part formerly embraced personal and historical identities? How do we select what we want, need, and wish to bring along with us and what we should, must leave behind us? What is relevant for our future as individuals and as collective groups to be brought, preserved and defended? What is actually the scale of values that we are unknowingly developing thanks to the act of ‘leaving’, ‘parting ways’?

With latent references to two timeless expressions of beauty and poetry in music (Palestrina’s Motet ‘’O Bone Jesu’’ and Purcell’s ‘’Here the Deities Approve’’) the friction between memory and its sublimation (thanks in part to the physical act of 'parting ways') is within 'Partendo’ a recurrent subject of conversation.

Performative aspects, uniquely present in the staged version, will not only embrace the entire music contents and its meanings, but will create ‘islands’ of thoughts, will inject formal ’intermezzi’. Perturbing the original form, visual and performative elements will challenge the previously built order and create a dialectic relationship with that given element (the already present music material). By providing new semantics and cognitives experiences, the visual and performative elements will not only further the exploration of all the topics related to ‘PARTENDO’ but will transcend perspectives and hopefully categories and disciplines.

© 2015, KOALA PRODUCTIONS