Live Performance
darker
By David Lang e Bill Morrison
Cineconcert
PMCE Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble directed by Tonino Battista
music by David Lang
film by Bill Morrison
Co-production American Academy in Rome, Fondazione Musica per Roma, Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico ETS.
PRIMA INTERNAZIONALE
David Lang and Bill Morrison have collaborated on numerous projects over the years, including live ensemble performances with film projections Carbon Copy Building (The Kitchen, 2000), The New Yorkers (BAM Next Wave, 2003), Shelter (BAM Next Wave, 2005), and Anatomy Theater (LA Opera, 2016), as well as standalone films How to pray (2006), Back to the Soil (2014), Let me come in (2021), The Village Detective: a song cycle(2021). darker is their tenth collaboration, spanning 24 years.
darker is in many ways more like an object than a piece of music. An extreme exploration of emotional restraint, it is a long, slow passing from something mostly even and pleasant to something a little less pleasant. My piece, like life, expends a lot of effort to go a very short distance, from beautiful to a little less beautiful, from a little light to something a little darker.
- David Lang
With darker, I took inspiration from David’s minimal score to create a film that, like the music, can exist both before and under the viewer’s eyelids. A slowly, lilting depiction of the Sublime, where actors, dancers, and acrobats reappear and then disappear back into a bubbling morass of time.
I am so honored to be able to present the International premiere of “darker” at UnArchive Found Footage Festival as a live cineconcert. In its first two years, the festival has had extremely intelligent programming that interrogates the role of the Archive in society. It also offers film lovers a chance to meet and talk in a beautiful and intimate setting. I have enjoyed watching the festival grow in international prestige during its first two years, and certainly the collaboration with the American Academy in Rome and Parco della Musica is an exciting development for all of us who care about the festival. Im looking forward to returning to Trastevere for the third edition!
- Bill Morrison
PMCE Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble
directed by Tonino Battista
violins I
Filippo Fattorini
Egida Zeneli
Fjorela Asqeri
Miriam Guerrieri
violins II
Maya Kadish
Agnieszka Opiola
Paolo Lozupone
violas
Luca Sanzò
Alessio Toro
cellos
Anna Armatys
Kyungmi Lee
double bass
Massimo Ceccarelli
May 31
09:00 pm.
Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone – Teatro Studio Borgna
TICKETS
Bill Morrison
David Lang
David Lang is one of America’s most highly esteemed and performed composers. Lang’s score for Paolo Sorrentino’s film Youth received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, among others. The little match girl passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices, was lauded by The Guardian as “one of the top 25 works of classical music written in the 21st Century.” It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 and the recording received a Grammy Award in 2010. His opera prisoner of the state (with libretto by Lang) was co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Rotterdam’s De Doelen, London’s Barbican Centre, Barcelona’s l’Auditori, Bochum Symphony Orchestra, Bruges’s Concertgebouw, and Malmö Opera, and premiered June 2019 in New York, conducted by Jaap van Zweden. Lang is a Professor of Music Composition at the Yale School of Music. He is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can. Lang was a fellow in 1991 and a 2017 resident at the American Academy in Rome.
Tonino Battista
His training and contextual practice in orchestral conducting and composition give Tonino Battista a particular depth of understanding and interpretation of scores from all epochs and the ability to measure himself on an equal footing with new languages, including electroacoustic experience and improvisation. These qualities as a boundless performer define him as one of the most versatile conductors on the international scene and allow him to master a vast repertoire, from baroque to contemporary, including musical theatre, musicals and applied music.
He has collaborated with the greatest living performers and composers, conducting numerous works. Karlheinz Stockhausen counted him among his favourite performers.
Guest of prestigious Italian and international orchestras, since 2009 he has been the permanent conductor and artistic coordinator of the PMCE Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble, the orchestra of the Fondazione Musica per Roma, resident at the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, dedicated to the study and promotion of the music of our time. At the same time, he also holds the position of Music Consultant for Contemporary Music at the Fondazione Musica per Roma.
Since 2017, he has held the position of Music Advisor at the American Academy in Rome.
He has always managed to integrate his activity as performer with that of composer: his works have been performed by internationally renowned performers and recorded in numerous recordings. Among other publications, he recorded for WERGO the first complete recording of Hans Werner Henze’s Concerto for double bass and orchestra and for ECM, a CD with compositions by Stefano Scodanibbio. For the Parco della Musica Records label, he has released several CDs with the PMCE Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble.
PMCE Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble
Directed by Tonino Battista, the PMCE Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble is an orchestra made up of musicians specialised in new performing techniques, capable of interpreting and conveying the diverse and multifaceted richness of today’s music.
Established in 2009 at the behest of the Fondazione Musica per Roma at the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, the PMCE Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble, season after season, with concerts in Italy and abroad, is one of the most established ensembles on the international scene, featuring musicians who have worked closely with composers from all over the world.
The PMCE Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble has to its credit an extraordinary variety of realised programmes, many of them with premiere works, representative of composers from the recent past, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Gyorgy Ligeti, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, Igor Stravinsky, Frank Zappa, Giya Kancheli – and living composers, such as Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Gavin Bryars, Unsuk Chin, Sofia Gubaidulina, Ivan Fedele, Salvatore Sciarrino, Franco Donatoni, Giorgio Battistelli, Lucia Ronchetti, John Adams, Francesco Filidei, Francesco Antonioni, Kevin Volans, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, Francesca Verunelli, Luca Francesconi, Stefano Gervasoni, Ondřej Adámek and many other contemporary composers and composers.
Since 2009, the PMCE Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble has been present in the annual programme of the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone dedicated to the music of our time.