Скачать или смотреть Massimiliano Pascucci: 'Via Crucis', for 8 voices and percussion

The 'Via Crucis' is a short Cantata for 8 voices and percussion. It was composed in 2016 for the 'I Vesperali' concerts by Massimiliano Pascucci, an Italian composer and conductor of Vox Àltera Ensemble. The author, under the strongly emotional impressions of some Italian and Flemish sculptures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had been planned for more than 20 years to set to music the fourteen Stations of the Cross, fifteen if completed with that of the resurrection of the body of Christ, as in this case. From the beginning the intention was to bring the event to its original essence, that of a ruthless execution, made public for political reasons. He has tried to represent the events of the Cross with the emotional immediacy of a raw chronicle of events, as well as have been handed down from various sources, entrusted with highly evocative and expressionist way to the voices of a small chorus a cappella and to the sounds of some percussion.
Thus, instead of the ordinary singing, he prefered to use a variant of the 'Sprechgesang' of Schoenberg matrix, because free from the exactness of musical intervals and more respectful of the word and its expressive value.
Then he adopted primitive and repetitive musical forms like the canon and heterophony, to enhance and amplify the simple but intense semantic and phonetic values of the text.
Still, he chose to set to music only the titles of the stations, in Latin text extract from the 'Coeleste Palmetum', published in 1760 by German Jesuit Wilhelm Nakatenus, and because synthetic and highly evocative of the facts narrated, and not to fall in the temptation of too personal and arbitrary comments.
Finally, according to executive search of Vox Àltera Ensemble, the piece was composed together with a simple but highly symbolic choreography, adapted to communicate to the public with greater intensity, the contrast between the unaffected titles and the emotional reactions to the contents narrated.
For the same need for realistic and symbolic narrative together, he chose to use as percussions the same objects used in the Passion of Christ, such as chains, nails, planks of wood, stones, whips and more.
Photos by Luana Beeli.