- Ballad opera based on melodies by Francis Poulenc
- a project by Martino Ruggero Dondi and Lorenzo Ponte
- dramaturgy by Ginevra Salvaggio
- musical direction and adaptation by Martino Ruggero Dondi
- directed by Lorenzo Ponte
- set design by Alice Benazzi
- costumes by Giulia Rossena
- lighting by Emanuele Agliati and Alessandro Manni
- with Vittorio del Monte, Shinobu Kikuchi, Alberto Marcello, Filippo Polinelli, Ginevra Salvaggio and Annapaola Trevenzuoli
- photos by Masiar Pasquali
- production coordination by Proxima Res, with the support of Opera Awards and Lac, Lugano theatre
Bestiario notturno is a musical theatre show that stems from the collective work of an artistic team brought together by a desire to make music and theatre. Its strength and uniqueness in the cultural landscape lies in the fact that we are a team that combines professionals from the worlds of music and theatre. Bestiario notturno offers the opportunity to encounter a great 20th-century author by taking a less travelled path. It is an attempt to discover new ways of producing and enjoying musical theatre.
The night opens a curtain: it suspends the laws of daytime reality; its figures, invisible in sunlight, take centre stage. An old hotel by the hour is the only place open in the city. This is where a woman takes refuge. She says nothing, sits down, stares obsessively at her mobile phone: she seeks distraction from her desperate loneliness. She has fled from another work by Poulenc, La voix humaine, to write a different ending. Suddenly, a space of suspension opens up for her. The superficial seriousness of everyday life gives way to a balancing act between depth and lightness, triggered by poetic words and music: the inhabitants of the night speak with the verses of Apollinaire, Éluard, Max Jacob, and Louise de Vilmorin, to whom Francis Poulenc gave life in his mélodies and chansons and around whom the dramaturgy of Bestiario notturno took shape.
At the bar counter, barmaid Jeanne accompanies the protagonist on a journey of discovery through a whole bestiary of anxieties and petty human miseries. Six singers bring to life a carousel of real and dreamlike characters inspired by the life and works of Poulenc. A broker tired of his marriage, two young boys looking for a love nest, a disconsolate prostitute, a fisherman, a pair of clowns and a crazy, visionary vagabond who cannot distinguish reality from dreams dance around the woman's melancholy. The late hour, their mutual strangeness and chance proximity, intoxication and dreams loosen the bonds of reality and grant them a space of unjustified intimacy, an opportunity for an encounter that would otherwise be impossible. Dawn breaks and the curtain falls on this humanity. Returning home at first light, the woman - and with her the audience - will reflect on her loneliness, without certainties, but perhaps with emotion and a little tenderness.
The music
The diversity of characters encountered by the woman is reflected in the rich timbre of the ensemble, thanks to a new orchestration of the piano pieces that remains faithful to Poulenc's sound: the ensemble is that of Le Bal Masqué, an octet in which the classic timbre of the strings (reduced to solo violin and cello) is dominated by the more bold timbre of the woodwinds (oboe, clarinet, bassoon and trumpet), harmonically supported by the piano, also valued for its timbral qualities, and rhythmically by a variety of percussion instruments.
A recurring element is the ringing of the telephone, a rhythmic figure “stolen” from La voix humaine and assigned, not as in the opera, to the xylophone, but to the glockenspiel, which shifts it into a more dreamlike dimension. At the height of the night, this repeated ringing, an expression of an obsessive and painful thought, is transformed into music, merging with the notes of the song that dissolves the woman's torment. Through song, in fact, the intense and refined language of early 20th-century poetry set to music, in which lyrical élan and grotesque humour coexist, offers the protagonist the opportunity to give voice to her feelings, in a journey that leads her to dawn - to a new beginning.
Director's notes
Bestiario notturno takes place in a liminal space, a place on the edge of reality. The hotel with its bar that is always open could exist only in the woman's mind, and the characters who pass through it could be the stuff of dreams. The scene is treated as if it were emerging from an underground, buried place. As if we were inside an urban wreck. The journey of Bestiario notturno is also a journey into the fear of things that end, that we must let go of. The woman's experience is the viewer's experience.
Entering this bar requires letting go of control. The dialogues, like thin threads, intertwine and hold the poems together. The singers and actors, giving substance to the verses, become ferrymen on this journey into the night, where rationality blurs and new possibilities of meaning unfold, for that woman fleeing from unbearable pain and for us sitting at the same bar.
July 2025
Giulia Rossena
