Nicola Campogrande
Cronache animali
Taschenoper
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Nicola Campogrande
Cronache animali
Taschenoper
- Instrumentation Voice
- Composer Nicola Campogrande
- Edition Piano Reduction
- Publisher Breitkopf & Härtel KG
- Order no. EB9650
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Description:
In 1998 I composed "Cronache animali" based on poems by Toti Scialoja and called it a "pocket opera for singing actress and five instruments". It is a series of 33 microsongs, expressly not intended for a trained opera singer, but for an actress - originally Paola Roman. With a 110-metre-long painted canvas roll by Giorgio Barullo and a small troupe of musicians, an idiosyncratic stage form was created, which today I would rather call music theater. The musicians not only played, but also acted, imitated animals and helped to set up and dismantle the heavy stage machine. After the debut in Stuttgart, we toured concert halls, schools and public places for years, with over eighty performances. Later, a CD was made that kept the work alive beyond the group's dissolution. In 2025, the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano invited me to rework the piece for a young audience. I reduced the ensemble, added a string orchestra and refined details without changing the original style. Now a new chapter begins with different performers. What remains decisive is what the writer Dario Voltolini wrote about the CD as the central quality: "The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the most valuable quality of this festive show, created by Nicola Campogrande from the words of Toti Scialoja, lies in the gentleness that accompanies the refined short circuits of syllables and phonemes that Scialoja - touched by grace - has created in our Italian language." Here it is: gentleness is the key to interpreting this score of mine. If possible, please keep this in mind. (Nicola Campogrande, October 2025)