For the 40th anniversary of the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Teatro Verdi in Pordenone has commissioned from Azio Corghi ‘ ..tra la carne e il cielo...’ (between flesh and heaven) for concertante cello, male reciting voice, soprano, piano and orchestra. The libretto by Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis was based upon texts by Pasolini. The interpreters Silvia Chiesa (cello), Omero Antonutti (actor), Valentina Coladonato (soprano), Maurizio Baglini (piano) and the Turin Philharmonic Orchestra will be conducted by Tito Ceccherini. “…tra la Carne e il Cielo…” is a work based on the echoes of a struggle between the “carne” of Pasolini’s poetry  and the “cielo” of Bach’s music.

“The creative idea for the composition arose out of my reading of an essay by Giuseppe Magaletta entitled Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Studi sullo stile di Bach.
[…] The artist interprets his own dramatic personal life through the music of Bach, rendering it a key for interpreting life itself. In his early formative years in Friuli during the war, in a period that was particularly difficult, Pasolini listened to Bach for the first time performed by a violinist friend of the family, Pina Kalc.
[…] Out of this experience came one of his writings:

‘In those months Bach represented for me an extremely powerful and complete distraction […] Every time that I listened to it again, with all its tenderness and anguish, it placed me before that content: a struggle, sung ad infinitum, between flesh and heaven, between certain low, veiled, warm notes and other shrill, terse, abstract notes… How much I used to side with the flesh! […]’

Pasolini’s work is permeated by a concept of the body that marks off life and death; this because the paths of thought and existence are as if traced in fire on flesh, and flesh stands at the basis of experience. Pasolini’s end was at one and the same time similar to his work and dissimilar from him. Similar because he had already described in his work its squalid and atrocious form, dissimilar because he himself was not one of his own characters but rather a central figure in our culture, a poet that had marked an epoch, a brilliant director, an inexhaustible essayist.”
(Azio Corghi)