GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING – DVD

Translation by Davide Andreis

The DVD with the recording of two performances of January 19 and 20 will be on sale from February 22 at the exhibitions’ bookshops in Bologna and Vicenza, and starting from Friday, February 21, online at the Linea d’ombra website.
It will come with a booklet of 24 pages with photos and the lyrics written by Goldin and Battiato, an introduction by Marco Goldin, which explains the show and its paintings, a footage of the rehersals and the backstage of the show itself.

The DVD costs €18. At the bookshops it will be sold in combo with the catalog, for a total price of € 40.

Click here to be redirected to the Linea d’Ombra online shop.

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Girl with a Pearl Earring
Show by Marco Goldin , with music and participation of Franco Battiato

Recording made at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna, on 19 and 20 January 2014, of the show created, written and directed by Marco Goldin, with the special participation of Franco Battiato, composer of music and performer on stage with Alice and Francesca Michielin .

The DVD starts with the story, narrated by Marco Goldin, of the exhibition and the paintings and continues with a beautiful footage showing the rehersals and the backstage. The show, written by Goldin as a one-act play with music by Franco Battiato, illustrates more than the life of Vermeer, the sentiment that led to the creation of the Girl with a Pearl Earring. 

The stage action is composed of four scenes – from the beach of Scheveningen to Vermeer’s studio in Delft – linked together by a musical theme. Playing Vermeer, placed in a kind of world beyond life, from which he speaks, is Giulio Brogi. The other actors engaged with him in the scene are Gilberto Colla, Loriano Della Rocca and Fiorenzo Fiorito, respectively, in the role of the people met in the street, at church and at the market.

Goldin then imagined, and represented on stage, a sort of self-dialogue of the painting’s protagonist, in two different moments of her life, in a mix of songs animated by the wonderful voice of Alice, masterful interpreter of timeless songs, and Francesca Michielin.

A conversation, a dialogue sung wit different scenarios, suspended in time and space, with the background of seventeenth-century’s Netherlands, underlined by the sets, made with striking and clever video creations, by Fabio Massimo Iaquone in collaboration with Luca Attilii, while Erminia Palmieri signed the scenic desing and costumes. Light designer: Filipa Romeu.

The whole show was built around the splendid music of Franco Battiato, who, for this occasion, revised the original composition created for Telesio, a work that had a single performance in 2011, and has been adapted here together with the maestro Carlo Boccadoro, who also played the piano and coordinated the musical ensemble.

Franco Battiato not only created the music, but he even went on stage to play, along with Alice, two songs. First, Nel mercato di Delft  and then Insieme nel mondo, which Goldin put as a seal on his story at the end of the show.

On stage with Carlo Boccadoro on piano, Angelo Privitera (Keyboards and programming) and The Modern String Quartet, composed by Cesare Carretta (Violin I), Aldo Capicchioni (Violin II), Aldo Zang (Viola) and Henry Guerzoni (Cello). Sound Engineer, Pino Pischetola.

The show was produced in collaboration with International Music and Arts.

DVD duration: 148 minutes .

(from Linea d’Ombra website)

GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING – 19/20 JANUARY 2014

Translation by Davide Andreis

9:45 AM   Without hitches it wouldn’t be one of our usual trips that leads us to Carla 😉
My mythical C1 has got a blown-out light bulb and who do I turn to? My reliable gas station guy, of course! Actually I guess that all good gas stations workers can replace a light bulb and I don’t even think that maybe someone can’t…

Behold! This was the premiss…

The guy, actually a young man in his thirties, hits the ground running and tries (and I emphasize tries) to completely disassemble the housing in where the poor thing lies… From inside the car, terrified, I look at him while he removes all the screws except the very last one that he just can’t unscrew… Meanwhile, time goes by fast, Flavio is waiting for me… After half an hour the young guy gives up, retightens everything and I, in misery, leave the gas station…  At this point, a stop at the bakery is definitely a must … we’ll replace the bulb later on…

1:00 PM  Our friendly navigator with its clear female voice has just advised us that there is a faster route than what we set… And it has independently decided to change it… Minding its own business?!? Out of the question?!? 🙂

6:45 PM   We are outside the theater in the cold. They explained the complicated mechanism by which they’ll let us in, and I realized that only if at the time of delivery – and not a second later – we are not here with our booking confirmation print-out, we could even cry a river but we’d stay out. And so here we stand waiting…   I am sitting on an icy step which is literally numbing the areas I sit on. But that’s OK  🙂

JAN. 21, returning home   We resume our journey after two very nice days, carrying over new sensations given to us by the two evenings we had the good fortune to attend.

The show is a synthesis of Art in its whole, a perfect blend of painting, music and poetry that takes the audience along a perhaps unknown path, made ​​up mostly of feelings, not facts, and images aroused by the words of the painter (Vermeer) in an imaginary journey between past and future, in an unreal and suspended reality, designed by brushstrokes of light in the shadows that reveal rather than hiding. On the plot, woven by the music of Battiato, the two voices of the same protagonist move around, in the first dialogue between the two ages of the girl with the earring, a before and after that voids each other in time of existence.

Carla and Francesca Michielin well identify themselves in this role and their voices speak to each other in a time that voids the gap between past and present, one is reflected in the experience of the other, the voice of the one found in the other herself of the past.

The two songs sung with Franco Battiato are the perfect synthesis of the relationship between the artist painter and his creature. The music of Battiato is a gem that enhances the beautiful texts of Goldin and to us, the contrast between Battiato’s dark clothes Carla’s pale dress, makes us think of the game of light and shadow, which is the leitmotif of the show. We like to believe that it represents the artist painter, whose soul, apparently plunged into darkness, lives up in the light of his finest work.

Carla’s strong stage presence, emphasized by her dress, specially made for this event, suits magnificently to the role of the protagonist, a white figure appears and disappears in the unfolding of a single act emerging from the shadow of the backstage, to go back to the dark again, like in the paintings shown in the prologue by Marco Goldin, lights illuminate the quiet shadows of faces, woods and church interiors.

The veil lowered in some occasions in front of the stage is of great emotional impact; on it are projected parallel images that recall the paintings of the exhibition introduced by this show, while the staged reality continues to flow behind the veil that hides but at the same time shows, doesn’t divide spaces but instead unites them in the uniqueness of time

After the show we head for a pizza for a quick meal; our intention is to leave immediately, but we parked the C1 in a parking lot that closes at one AM: will we make it? The panic takes me and I lay the watch on the table to control the inexorable passage of time, waiting for the pizzas…

At the end , as always, is Marina that pulls us out of trouble. Along with Davide, she leaves the pizzeria to retrieve our car but… There’s always a but in these situations… I forgot to give her the parking ticket and shortly thereafter she will have to start a discussion with the valet, who thinks she’s a thief of small cars 😉  but Marina always sorts out every problem, and after signing (not by blood ) a statement in which she swears that not only she is not a thief but a Mistress problem solver, she recovers the small C1 and we can then start our return trip  🙂