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Martino Traversa's Oratorio Stranieri Premiered in Parma, Italy by Ensemble Prometeo

Dec. 01, 2024

On November 17, Ensemble Prometeo, led by Marco Angius, premiered Martino Traversa's oratorio Stranieri at the Centro di Produzione Musicale Arturo Toscanini in Parma, Italy.

Traversa explains his new work, set to a libretto by Fabio Vittorini:

"Stranieri wants to shape a prayer, radically secular, in favor of memory. It is also a prayer against the forgetfulness that every man sooner or later uses, consciously or not, as an instrument of defense or power. We forget the events that made us suffer; we forget the events that made others suffer. We forget the effort made to gain the right to a place in the world; we forget that others will make the same effort after us. We forget that, before we felt good in our own skin, we were strangers to ourselves and we wore that skin with discomfort or anger. We forget that our rights are sometimes the result of fortuitous favorable circumstances, such as the place and time we were born; we forget that others will try to obtain the same rights in spite of equally fortuitous unfavorable circumstances. We forget that every man migrates or tries to migrate, not always moving in space, toward states of greater happiness, whose premises are security and well-being. In Stranieri a successful man forgets that once he was a restless young man looking for an identity, but his daughter impetuously reminds him; two mothers, mirroring each other, remember putting their own lives at risk to give their children a better future; a bourgeois girl and a refugee boy, escaping from their families, remember each other’s voids and denials on which they presume to build their future; two brothers, not by blood but by choice, remember each other that in this strange world you can be better than those who lied, choosing to tell the truth. In Stranieri the contradictions of our conscience are condensed into a sort of parable ending with a stubborn note of hope."

To learn more about Martino Traversa, visit universaledition.com.

Martino Traversa
Stranieri (2021)
a chamber oratorio in one act and five scenes. Prima scena: "Padre e Figlia" 
for alto, bass, violin, viola, violoncello, flute, clarinet in Bb, piano and percussion
15'

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