Radio version of the audiovisual performance

By Paolo F. Bragaglia

Damian Dombrowski, Chiara Pietroni: narrators
Ludovica Gasparri: soprano

On stage
Lillevan: live cinema, images
Paolo F. Bragaglia: sound design, synthesizer
Leonardo Francesconi: piano, synthesizer

Don Giovanni is one of the archetypes of our culture, one of its founding myths. And myth is not an inert fable but an active, creative force, it nourishes, in a surprisingly circular way, the very culture that gave it life. Over the course of four centuries, Don Giovanni has taken on – or disguised himself in – countless and extraordinarily varied forms.

With this audiovisual project, we seek to explore the recurring and often mutable archetype concealed beneath Mozart’s masterpiece, creating a performance that draws on a contemporary aesthetic and language. Mozart’s music itself undergoes metamorphosis, electronic, sampled and manipulated, from old vinyl records to acoustic renditions, serving as the foundation for literary “evocations” of Don Giovanni, from Tirso de Molina to José Saramago, from Molière to Baudelaire, Hoffmann, Kierkegaard, Byron, and many others. And, of course, the operatic libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte.

The project includes readings, sung passages, and historical recordings of actors’ performances, a sound carousel that conjures the situations, characters, texts, and voices that have given life to the Don Giovanni myth across different historical periods, authors, and its continual metamorphoses. Whether invoking the unrepentant libertine or the punished sinner, the paradise of the senses, the complexity of human relationships, or the hell of damnation.

A production of Mozartfest Würzburg
World premiere: June 21, 2019

Paolo F. Bragaglia is an electronic composer born in an entirely analog world, who has stubbornly journeyed into our digital age. Ever fascinated by the metamorphosis of sound across genres, over the years he has expanded his interests toward the intersections between music and moving images, dance, architectural spaces, visual arts, spoken word, and theatre.

This has led to an intense career as a composer of film scores, soundtracks, and multimedia performances, alongside record production, sound art, and sound installations. He is the creator and artistic director of the electroacoustic music festival “Acusmatiq”, held for twenty years in Ancona at the Mole Vanvitelliana, and the founder and president of the Museo del Synth Marchigiano (Museum of the Marchigian Synth)

Usmaradio – Centro di Ricerca Interdipartimentale per la Radiofonia (CRIR) / Interdepartmental Research Centre for Radio Studies, is a workplace of The School of Radio to develop an innovative radio pedagogy. Workshops, work sessions, meetings, presentations of live performance as sections of the project. Produced by UNIRSM | Università degli Studi della Repubblica di San Marino.

Each week one member of the Radia Network produces a show for all the others. The Radia Network emerged from a series of meetings, clandestine events, late-night club discussions, and a lot of email exchanges between cultural radio producers across Europe. The topics vary and the reasons for forming a network are many, but Radia has become a concrete manifestation of the desire to use radio as an art form. The approaches differ, as do the local contexts; from commissioned radio art works to struggles for frequencies to copyright concerns, all the radios share the goal of an audio space where something different can happen. That different is also a form in the making––radio sounds different in each city, on each frequency. Taking radio as an art form, claiming that space for creative production in the mediascape and cracking apart the notion of radio, is what Radia does.

It is producing radio stuff that is hard to describe. Some of it can be labeled radio art, or experimental radio, or creative radio. Sometimes it talks, sometimes it doesn’t. It can be noisy, or a kind of soundscape, or a documentary, a document, a talk, a performance. Each and every week, one of the partners will provide the network program, commissioned and produced especially for this purpose: being broadcast by all the partners and made available online.

Some things have to be said about all those partners. They are radio stations, of the independent, non-commercial, community, cultural species. They all speak different languages, and this should create interesting problems. Although initially they were all European radio stations this has changed over time, and Radia has become not only larger but also more diverse: 22 partners in 14 countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Duuu (Paris, FR)
* ∏node (Mulhouse, Paris, FR)
* Diffusion (Sydney, AU)
* JET FM (Nantes, FR)
* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)
* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)
* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)
* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)
* Radio One 91 FM (Dunedin, NZ)
* Radio Panik (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Papesse (Firenze, IT)
* Radio Student (Ljubljana, SI)
* radio x (Frankfurt/Main, DE)
* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)
* RadioWORM (Rotterdam, NL)
* Reboot.fm (Berlin, DE)
* Resonance FM (London, UK)
* Soundart Radio (Dartington, UK)
* TEA FM (Zaragoza, ES)
* Usmaradio (San Marino, SM)
* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)
* Mobile Radio (Ürzig, DE)
* Radioart106 (Haifa, PS48)

More information at http://radia.fm