‘Songs from the House of the Living’, is configured as a melologue capable of combining original music with words, suggestions and emotions that weave a multifaceted topography of stories collected on an uncertain and ‘transgressive’ border, in the sense that it must be transgressed to acquire profound meaning, since it embraces and intersects life and death, geography and wanderings, melancholy and laughter.

The small Jewish cemetery of Valdirose (Nova Gorica), just across the border that today divides two states, tells its own story, evoking ten tombstones that narrate the history and destiny of the people of whom they are the emblem and testimony. In there, in that tiny ‘house of the living’, the plural identity of a complex, wounded and devastated Europe has settled, but also a marvellous example of complex beauty and cultural richness, which still tries to speak to us, to make us understand that all borders are made to be crossed. Even the one that apparently divides the living from the dead.

Music, like words, originates from multiple and heterogeneous sources and is complicated or simplified depending on the ghosts it is called upon to evoke. And of ghosts, this music possesses the heartfelt suspension and impalpable restlessness. The characters that populate the House of the Living have very dissimilar characters and social, human and cultural destinies. This allows the use of both erudite and popular musical forms to narrate them; in particular, some Hebrew songs provide the composition with precious and evocative musical material that will be varied and transfigured in the course of the score.

“Songs of the Border” is part of the Historical Workers’ Society of Pordenone’s project “Songs from the Border: Every Stone a Voice, Every Voice a Story.in the run-up to the event “GO! 2025 Nova Gorica Gorizia European Capital of Culture” and financed by the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, also aims to enhance the important site of the Jewish cemetery of Valdirose. It is significant for the Jewish community that lived in the border area between Italy and former Yugoslavia and for Central European culture, which is still a fundamental cultural glue for a vast portion of Europe.

Songs of the Border

Opera-Melologue in ten scenes, for reciting voices, mezzo-soprano and ensemble

Music by Carlo Galante

Text by Angelo Floramo

Commission of the Historical Opera Society of Pordenone

Reciting voices of the Piccolo Teatro Città di Sacile

Silvia Regazzo, mezzo-soprano

GO! Borderless Orchestra (Gabriele Bressan oboe/english horn, Davide Teodoro clarinet/bass clarinet, Ludovica Borsatti accordion, Mojca Batič violin, Barbara Grahor Vovk viola, Vida Furlan cello)

Eddi De Nadai, Director

in the framework of ‘Songs from the border: every stone a voice, every voice a story’,

Initiative for GO! 2025 Nova Gorica Gorizia European Capital of Culture

The concert is preceded by a tasting of selected local products, served in environmentally sustainable materials, by Chef Chiara Canzoneri.

Ticket including tasting: full price € 8 – reduced € 6