Shakespeare for Dreamers - conceived, born and nurtured on the stage.

All the pieces on this CD were created for actors. One of my musical jobs is that of improvising incidental music for theatre performances on the cello. It’s a job that involves a lot of sifting and selecting. Every time I hear one of my melodies being sung during a break in rehearsals, or actors complaining about musical themes that they can’t get out of their heads, I put them aside as precious musical material for the future. For years I have kept these good ideas for Shakespeare.

Within Shakespeare’s plays we can find texts of songs that were intended to be performed by the actors or musicians on stage. Reading them, one would think that Shakespeare’s expertise in the art and craft of writing led him to put aside the refinement of the sonnets and the pentameters of the theatrical verses to write simplistic lines for music, which, nowadays, we would dismiss as being commercial. The language of his songs is “pop”: based on monosyllables, rhythm and repetition. It’s classical in the precipices of its profundity; light music of extreme weight.

Although some of the original melodies have been reconstructed, most directors ask for newly-composed music for their productions, just as they commission new costumes or scenery to make their productions original and unique. It is therefore not difficult for a composer to have the most famous playwright in history as his author, but it’s a fleeting privilege.

My chance came in 2010 when the director Marco Alotto asked me to set to music two songs from A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Fairies Song and If we shadows have offended – for the Language on Stage Festival in Turin, an event in which young students from all over Europe perform theatre classics, acting together but each in their own language. This meant that the songs had to be written so that they could be easily sung by non-professional singers accompanied by on-stage instrumentalists (cello, clarinet and trumpet).

I was asked to write in a style somewhere between Monteverdi and pop. At the time I had only ever composed fifteen minutes of music in my life. I mixed together everything that I loved the most (Monteverdi, Poulenc, Shostakovich, De André, Schubert, Jewish music, music from Armenia, Sardinia and Naples, Bach, Rota, Monty Python, the Beatles…) to create a musical style, which, like Shakespeare’s English, stole the grammar, the vocabulary, the humour, and the inflections from predecessors to become something completely new.

I remember being struck by a painting on a calendar as I went into the house of a person who was to become a friend of mine. I tried to reproduce in music his Renaissance, dreamlike style, orchestrating with strong colours, transforming antique-sounding melodies according to the syntax of dreams, in which every familiar situation undergoes a metamorphosis towards something strange and unknown.

That picture by the Armenian artist Ashot Yan is, today, the cover of this CD.

The experiment seemed to have worked. This led me to give in to temptation and without waiting for a commission I gradually set other Shakespeare songs to music. With the Piccola Orchestra Lumière and the irreplaceable voice of Adele Pardi and under the directorship of Elisa di Liberato, we created a show which alternates these songs with scientific explanations of the various stages of sleep and with accounts of dreams, recorded during a series of interviews to which the general public was invited to contribute. Then the show dreamt of becoming a CD.
“Give up sleep to create a dream”, this is the motto of the CD which you are now holding in your hand and which was literally recorded in the middle of the night to take advantage of the Philharmonic Hall in Trento without the daytime noise from the street. I give my heartfelt thanks to all my musician friends who did great things in the small hours of the morning. You can see their names, famous or yet-to-become, on the next page(s).

The summer when we recorded this CD, one evening on a Dalmatian island following the Piccola Orchestra Lumiere’s cine-concert, a distinguished gentleman by the name of Bojan Bujic’, an Emeritus Fellow of musicology at Oxford University, came to compliment us. I asked him if he knew anyone who could write an introductory essay on Shakespeare and Music for this CD. He put me in contact with his esteemed Italian pupil, Gianfranco Serioli.
This was in 2013. Since then, we have spent three years in search of a recording label: Record producers for classical music turned the CD down because they found it too much like “pop” and pop music producers were not interested because they regarded it as classical music. Concerning this, I quote from the essay “Shakespeare and Music” by Professor Serioli:

Among Shakespeare’s audiences, there were people who were accustomed to hearing complex and elaborate compositions, such as those played in court, as well as other people who were more used to songs from the taverns and other popular melodies. Shakespeare, who tried to show the complexity of the human soul in his plays and who included characters from all walks of life, could not afford to ignore the mix of people in his audience. Popular song texts of the period often appeared in his dialogues, and well-known melodies or modified versions of them were used in the performances .This was a very good method to guarantee the audience’s attention and get their active participation. As has always been the case with works for the theatre and more recently with films, instrumental music helps to enhance the dramatic or romantic atmosphere of the scene. Depending on the setting, the famous playwright used maritime texts and tunes, lullabies, songs about pain and love, etc. Obviously Shakespeare’s theatre also made use of the most evocative associations: trumpets and drums with marching rhythms announced the entrance of regal characters or accompanied battle scenes, while more solemn music was used to characterise processions or funerals. Refined dance music accompanied banquet scenes while more popular dance music was used for tavern scenes or for similarly shady settings…

But is Shakespeare classical or pop? … And this CD?
Destiny played its part when in 2016, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, we met a record producer who gave us the reply: “Does it matter?”
If, however, this Hamletic doubt continues to bother you, try digging in the car-park in Leicester, mentioned in the piece entitled Basse Dance for Richard III, where the key for this work was lost.

(Nicola Segatta)

Nicola Segatta: a Renassaince artist by Giovanni Sollima
I have known Nicola Segatta for several years. Nicola is a special person with particular artistic talents who I would not hesitate to call a genius; one of those people who bring to mind certain characters from the Italian Renaissance; at the same time being musicians, instrument makers, singers, composers, philosophers and scientists. Nicola possesses a versatility which is rare in our age, in which everything, or almost everything, is ruled by “specialisations”, by a system which – often – generates, understands and therefore encourages a form of “mono-directional” creativity. Nicola is a composer who brings into play many of his other abilities when actually composing: an excellent cellist and instrument maker (he plays on a cello, which he made himself, in my opinion an extension of his own voice and a wooden case of his own music); he plays the piano, sings, writes texts, speaks six languages and has an eye for the visual and the imagination to see what others cannot. His curiosity, combined with his pleasant personality and powers of intuition, open up a variety of different fields for him and gives him the knowledge and the practical ability to be a skilled, all-round composer: powerful ideas, musical forms – even of large proportion, expert in research, musical roots, visual projects, curiosity, a feeling for orchestration, for colour, for musical line. I know several of his projects and I have had the pleasure to perform and record some of his pieces with him, among which are the three contained on this CD: Come unto these yellow sands, Tango per il Teatro Valle and Passemeze and, on that occasion, Nicola’s “Renaissance” skills, which I mentioned before, revealed themselves again: instinct and knowledge in perfect balance. This, in addition to a very healthy personal ability to organise musical material in real time and with the utmost precision, following a strong, dramatic line, which I find (together with something evocative and even surreal, between the tragic and the ironic) one of his particular strengths. Leaving the Renaissance idea aside, Nicola is, of course, a modern artist; in the sense that the weight of academic training has, in no way, curbed his freedom of thought!