Giovanni Sollima & Il Pomo d’Oro

Giovanni Sollima, conductor and cellist
Il Pomo d’Oro, orchestra

“Al-Bunduqiyya: the lost concert” is a tribute to Venice, which takes up the ancient name of the city in the title, as a place of coexistence of different communities and cultures, coming from the Mediterranean, from the lands of the North, from the Levant. A city that has since disappeared, but traces of which can be found, for example, in the toponymy: Salizada dei Greci, Riva degli Schiavoni, Campiello degli Albanesi, Fontego dei Turchi, Calle dei Ragusei, Fondamenta dei Mori, Campo dei Tedeschi, Sottoportico degli Armeni. Venice has always been a city of contamination, a fertile ground for the flourishing of the arts. A city in which, however, according to Giorgio Agamben, living today is like reading a dead language. Somehow, however, it still speaks and be read, just like compositions. The concert is articulated in an extraordinary assembly work of fragments of the past, of classical (Vivaldi, Tartini) and traditional music from the Mediterranean, with the aim of opening the compositions to unprecedented possibilities and giving the music a new life in the current time of execution and of listening. Making Antonio Vivaldi’s fragments resonate today, in a new composition and/or a re-composition in Giovanni Sollima’s unique style, opens them up to unprecedented possibilities, to a new life. Venice is the lost concerto.