The Portuguese premiere of Azio Corghi’s cantata for choir and orchestra De paz e de guerra will be performed in Lisbon on 15 November by the Orquesta Sinfonia Portuguesa and the Coro do Teatro Nacional de São Carlos under the direction of João Paulo Santos.

The performance is part of the concert season organized by the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisbon in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I. The cantata, commissioned by the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, was first performed in Rome in 2003.

It is based on a poem of the same name by the Portuguese Nobel prize winner José Saramago, one of the most intense poems in the poet’s 1966 collection Poesie possibili. Corghi and Saramago had already confronted the theme of peace and war in other works--the opera Blimunda and the music drama Divara)--but in De paz e de guerra Corghi, fascinated “by the sound of the words and the harmony of the phonetic juxtapositions,” has used the text of the original Portuguese for the first time. In the piece, which is rich in musical symbolism, there is a culmination on the word “war,” when the notes are positioned on the staff to form an atomic mushroom cloud while the hope for peace delicately carries the notes towards a higher plane.