Igor´ Fëdorovic Stravinskij L’histoire du soldat (vendere l'anima al diavolo)

**Igor Fëdorovich Stravinsky
The Soldier's Tale**

*1. Soldier's March
2. Music for Scene 1: Air by the Stream
3. Music for Scene 2: Pastoral
4. Royal March
5. Little Concert
6. Three Dances: Tango / Waltz / Ragtime
7. Devil's Dance
8. Little Chorale / Grand Chorale
9. Triumphal March of the Devil*

Violin Gabriele Ceci
Clarinet Cosimo Leuzzi
Trumpet Alessio Dimonte
Trombone Francesco Carbonara
Bassoon Marcello De Giuseppe
Double Bass Dunia Popovic
Percussion Stefano Baldoni
Conductor Luisella Chiarini
Narrator Vito Di Leo

Igor Fëdorovich Stravinsky
The Soldier's Tale
1. Soldier's March
2. Music for Scene 1: Air by the Stream
3. Music for Scene 2: Pastoral
4. Royal March
5. Little Concert
6. Three Dances: Tango / Waltz / Ragtime
7. Devil's Dance
8. Little Chorale / Grand Chorale
9. Triumphal March of the Devil

Violin Gabriele Ceci
Clarinet Cosimo Leuzzi
Trumpet Alessio Dimonte
Trombone Francesco Carbonara
Bassoon Marcello De Giuseppe
Double Bass Dunia Popovic
Percussion Stefano Baldoni
Conductor Luisella Chiarini
Narrator Vito Di Leo

*On his way home, a soldier on leave meets the devil, who flatters him and proposes a trade: if the soldier gives him his violin, he will receive a magic book capable of fulfilling every wish. The soldier agrees and experiences three days in which all his dreams seem to come true. But when the soldier, without his violin, arrives home, he discovers that three years have actually passed and his beloved has married. What is money worth without love? In despair, the soldier resumes his journey and reaches the land ruled by a king whose daughter, who is ill, will marry whoever can cure her. Meanwhile, the soldier cleverly regains his violin, and thanks to the violin, the princess is enchanted: she will dance a tango, a waltz, and a ragtime until she falls into the soldier's arms. It seems like the happy ending of a fairy tale, but when the two young lovers set off to reach the soldier’s homeland, the devil will wait for them at the crossroads of destiny to reclaim the violin and the soul, and the soldier will have no choice but to follow him with his head bowed. This is the plot of the chamber work composed by Stravinsky in 1918, set to a text by his friend Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, in which an evident osmosis between biographical, autobiographical, historical, and aesthetic elements is seen, accumulated during the creation of this uniquely shaped work. Ultimately, as director Peter Sellars suggested, The Soldier’s Tale is the work of a refugee on the theme of being a refugee, born from the meeting of two exiles: a composer who had left revolutionary Russia and a writer self-exiled in his homeland. "I conceived the first idea for The Soldier's Tale in the spring of 1917," Stravinsky recounts, "the idea had occurred to me several times since the outbreak of the First World War. The kind of work I had in mind required a simple and modest set of performers to allow for a series of productions during a tour in Swiss towns and to have a narrative clear enough to be easily grasped. The subject came to me from reading a story by Afanasiev about the soldier and the devil... The choice of instruments was influenced by a very important event in my life at that time: the discovery of American jazz... The instrumentation resembles that of a jazz band as each instrumental family - strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion - is represented by its extremes, in the high and low registers. Additionally, the same instruments were used in jazz music, except the bassoon, which, to me, stood in for the saxophone... My knowledge of jazz came only from occasional readings of sheet music of this music. Although I had never been able to hear jazz improvised or played live, I was able to assimilate its rhythmic style as it was written, though not as it was performed. I was able to imagine the sound of jazz anyway, or at least I was pleased to think so. Jazz nonetheless meant a completely new combination of sonorities in my music, and The Soldier's Tale marks my decisive break with the production of the Russian symphonic school."*

**Here is the entire summer and autumn program of the Nino Rota Conservatory
https://conservatoriodimonopoli.org/concerti/**
Web: conservatoriodimonopoli.org...