Giorgio Battistelli (1953-)
L'imbalsamatore, drame joyeux

Riccardo Massai, acteur
Icarus Ensemble
Marco Angius, direction

From the liner notes by Marco Angius: “With an ever broader and more variegated catalogue, Giorgio Battistelli continues to renew (and to shake) contemporary musical theatre. Right from the beginning, with the very famous Experimentum Mundi, Battistelli has accepted and surpassed the legacy of the Moment-Form of Stockhausen and of certain post-modernist orientations of Kagel, aiming at a theatre of immanence which lives and burns in the very moment of its happening, although it is organised in extremely rigorous and recognisable formal structures. The dramaturgies of Battistelli’s works are in fact characterised by a plurality of expressive levels, evident in the originality of the subjects chosen, in the surprising creative approach (let us think of the invention of oggetti sonori in some key works like Jules Verne, Orazi e Curiazi, Begleitmsuik zu einer Dichtspielszene), in the processes themselves of transformation of the sound material that accompany the evolutions on the stage both essentially and imaginatively. One of the most surprising moments of this path of composition is certainly constituted by L’imbalsamatore (2001-2002), monodramma giocoso taken from the novel of the same name by Renzo Rosso and performed for the first time at the Almeida Theatre in London with the title The Embalmer. As a genre, L’imbalsamatore recalls the preceding cases of Aphrodite («monodramma di costumi antichi» of 1983) and Frau Frankenstein («monodramma del Prometeo moderno» of 1997-98), although here we find an exclusively actor’s presence of the protagonist. The unprecedented and reckless ensemble is composed by woodwinds and dark brasses, a vast set of percussion, a midi keyboard, cellos, double basses and elaborations with live electronics".