In tribute to La Scala season with Tosca by Giacomo Puccini, Fondazione Pesenti supports the traditional event “Le nuove pubblicazioni degli Amici della Scala,” conceived and promoted over the years by the “Amici della Scala” Association and its founder and president Anna Crespi.
This year were presented the volume Visconti. Cinema Teatro e Opera and the monographs on Carlo Carrà, Ezio Frigerio, Renato Guttuso, and Alfred Roller at La Scala.
The evening opened with the Children’s Choir of Teatro alla Scala, which carries on the legacy of the historic choir established in 1984 by Teatro alla Scala, directed over the years by Gerhard Schmidt-Gaden, Nicola Conci, and, from 1994 to today, by Bruno Casoni, director of the choir of Teatro alla Scala in Milan.
The Amici della Scala book for the “Sette Dicembre” series
In tribute to the opening of La Scala season 2019-2020
VISCONTI Cinema Teatro Opera
There are not many figures in Italian culture who acted in the twentieth century with the impact, intellectual complexity, and contradictory stimulus of Luchino Visconti (Milan, 1906 – Rome, 1976).
Aristocratic and communist, a tyrant at work and a man sensitive to social problems, Visconti grew up in a privileged world between art, high society, and horse racing, engaged in the anti-fascist struggle, and dedicated the second half of his life to a strenuous work of artistic renewal, dividing himself among prose theater, opera theater, and cinema.
These three fields continuously intersect and communicate with one another, exchanging investigative themes, formal solutions, and working methods. From the birth of neorealism with Ossessione to the historic shows at La Scala with Maria Callas, from the frescoes of Senso and The Leopard to the intimate confession of his last films, Visconti overturned conventions and categories producing a very personal synthesis, whose power of scandal and fascination has never ceased.
This book retraces his art in all its branches, through a critical reading and a spectacular collection of images.
The new monographs of Amici della Scala for the series
“The performers of the show at La Scala”
Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) approached musical theater twice: in the mid-1930s with Puccini’s La bohème, conceived for La Scala and later taken on tour in the Netherlands and Sanremo, and in 1957, when the Milanese theater presented the ballet La lampara by the young Franco Donatoni.
Structural values and tonal balance also prevail on stage, in tribute to the sense of form admired by Carrà in the painting of Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello.
Ezio Frigerio (Erba, Como, 1930): an eye that measures and tames space, regulates proportions, calibrates relationships, and gives the stage a poetic imagination capable of creating everlasting icons, like the sail in Boccanegra. Initially a costume designer, then a set designer, Frigerio has collaborated with La Scala for more than fifty years, signing an impressive number of productions for Strehler, Ronconi, Konchalovsky, Herzog, and Nureyev.
For Renato Guttuso (1911–1987), doing theater was not only an outlet for creativity but also an occasion for civil commitment. Four productions by Guttuso for La Scala testify to the incisiveness of his scenic language, the coherence with his painting style, and a poetic world pervaded by tragic, luminous Mediterranean spirit, both in opera and in the ballet L’amore stregone by Manuel de Falla (1962).
Among the leading figures in the cultural world of early twentieth-century Vienna, set and costume designer Alfred Roller (1864–1935) holds an absolutely prominent role. At Teatro alla Scala, his scenes for Der Rosenkavalier (1911, conductor Tullio Serafin) arouse admiration, but Richard Strauss’s waltzes cause a notorious uproar fomented by the dissenting group of Futurists.
Programma Amici della Scala 2019 www.amicidellascala.it