Saturday 28 March 2026, 2 hours1 – In the historical hall of the Teatro dell’Aquila di Fermo, the FORM – Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana, together with the Regional Choir ARCOM and the young musicians of the "Rossini" Conservatories of Pesaro and "G.B. Pergolesi" of Fermo, retrace under the direction of Manlio Benzi the great path of the soul that Verdi entrusted to his Requiem.

by Marialuisa Veneziano

«God never troubles the joy of his children except to prepare them for a more certain and greater.»
— Alessandro Manzoni

If the human soul was a land to be crossed, there would not be only bright plains and gentle slopes, but also sudden ravines, shadow valleys and cliffs from which the gaze struggles to detach. And it is perhaps from one of these inner cliffs that seems to be born Mass by Requiem by Giuseppe Verdi. Not as a peaceful music, not as a liturgy that goes down already consoled from above, but as a cry that rises from the depth of man, crosses the terror of judgment and slowly, almost with hesitation, seeks the way of mercy. Those who have had the opportunity to listen to her live know well that unique impression it produces: it is not only about attending a concert, but to take part in an experience that resembles a moral journey. So it was also in the performance of Saturday 28 March 2026 at the Teatro dell’Aquila di Fermo, where the FORM – Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana, enriched by students of the Conservatories "Gioachino Rossini" of Pesaro and "Giovanni Battista Pergolesi" of Fermo, together with the Regional Choir ARCOM and the quartet of the soloists Yulia Tkachenko, Mariangela Marini, Davide Giusti and Alessandro Abis, under the direction of Manlio Benzi, gave rise to an intense reading of this score that, at a distance of one hundred and fifty years, continues to question man more than comfort.

The Requiem was born in 1874 to commemorate Alessandro Manzoni. Greens, who was not prone to literary idolatry, nourished for the Lombard writer a veneration that aroused devotion. When he heard about his death, he wrote to the editor Remember words that reveal a seldom confessed emotion: «With him disappears one of the purest splendours of our glory». Now, those who are familiar with Verdi's temperament know how alien the composer was from all rhetorical sentimentalism; and yet that loss struck him as one gets hit when a figure disappears, which, despite not belonging to his own daily intimacy, represents a kind of collective moral consciousness. Manzoni had been, for many Italians of the nineteenth century, something like this: not only an author, but an ethical point of reference. It is not surprising that Verdi’s tribute was not just a musical commemoration, but a work of extraordinary spiritual complexity.

And here, if you look carefully, a consonance emerges that is not only literary but almost philosophical. The history of human consciousness — they knew well thinkers like Blaise Pascal or Søren Kierkegaard — is always suspended between two abyss: that of despair and that of faith. The man, writes Pascal, is «a thinking rod»: fragile in his matter, immense in his consciousness. The Requiem Verdiano seems to be born from this condition. We do not find a faith proclaimed with theological security, but a conscience that is questioned. Not a dogma, but a drama. In this sense Verdi’s music is surprisingly approaching the Manzonian vision of human moral history. In Wedding promises, the conversion of the Unknown represents perhaps one of the most profound moments of European literature: a man who, coming on the edge of the abyss, suddenly discovers that mercy can exist. It is exactly the same spiritual movement that crosses the structure of the Requiem.

This tension is already evident in the first lines of the Requiem aeternam. The entrance of the choir has nothing of the solemn proclamation: it is rather a breath, a prayer that is almost shy. The arches accompany with a suspended delicacy, as if the music itself feared to disturb the silence from which it emerges. Here Verdi demonstrates an extraordinary theatrical wisdom: faith does not appear as certainty, but as desire. The ARCOM Choir has returned this atmosphere, albeit with a pronounced shyness of female voices, keeping the sound suspended in an almost metaphysical dimension.

But who believed that this calm represents the definitive face of the Requiem He would soon be denied. Just wait a few minutes for the entire musical building to be shaken by one of the most impressive pages in the history of music: Dies. Here Verdi seems to want to evoke not only the day of judgment, but the moral earthquake that it represents for human consciousness. The brass explode with almost apocalyptic violence, the choir enters as a compact mass and the orchestra turns into a feverish organism. Many scholars have observed how this page possesses something profoundly Dante, and the reference to Dante Alighieri does not appear at all arbitrary. In the sound turbine of Dies it seems to glimpse the storms of Dante’s Hell, those souls overwhelmed by forces that can no longer govern.

But here there is also a deeper philosophical question. Judgment, in Christian tradition, is not only an eschatological event: it is also a metaphor for consciousness. Every man carries his own inner court. Immanuel Kant talked about «moral law within me and starry sky above me». Verdi, without any explicit philosophical claim, seems to transform this idea into music. The Dies It is not only the divine judgment: it is the moment when man is suddenly faced with his own truth.

The FORM has faced this moment with energy and compactness, supported by the enthusiasm of the students of the conservatives of Marche who have joined the teachers of the regional ensemble. But what was most striking was not only technical precision or sound power, but that rarer quality that could be called collective musical consciousness. The orchestrals of the FORM seemed to breathe together, as if each instrumental gesture was part of a greater thought than the individuality. In philosophy it would be said that here the individual is done in the community: not the sum of isolated musicians, but a living organism, able to transform the individual gesture into shared language. And this is one of the most silent miracles of orchestral art. The bows, compact and intense, possessed that timbre depth that allows green music to never become merely sound rhetoric; the brass, powerful but not brutal, sculpted the acoustic space with the almost liturgical dignity that this score requires; the woods, with their most intimate nuances, remembered that even in the heart of musical storms there is always a more fragile and more human inner voice.

The direction of Manlio Benzi has favoured a vibrant and theatrical reading, highlighting the dramatic dimension of Verdi's writing. If you would like to make a critical remark — and criticism, when it is sincere, must always maintain its freedom — some times of Dies Perhaps they could have adhered even more deeply to the narrative monumentality of the mature Green, which tends to sculpt terror with an almost sculptural gravity.

The choir, throughout the work, plays a role that goes far beyond that of simple sound mass. Verdi uses it as a sort of collective consciousness of humanity. In Quantus tremor est futurus writing assumes an almost declaiming character, as if the whole human species spoke with one voice in front of the unknown of the final judgment. The ARCOM Choir has shown here a compactness and clearness of remarkable joints.

In the Confutatis maledictis the drama takes on an almost theatrical form. The bass Alessandro Abis authoritatively pronounces the condemnation of the wicked, while the orchestra responds with a restless plea. Verdi builds this passage on a clear contrast between the serious and the acute register, between the sentence and the prayer. It is one of those moments when his operatic experience emerges strongly: the composer knows perfectly how to transform a theological concept into a musical gesture of immediate effectiveness.

Among the most moving pages emerge then the Lacrimo, where the invocation appears Save me, fons pietatis. Here music suddenly changes color. The melodic line of the soloists stretches with an almost disarming sweetness, as if the consciousness, after contemplating the abyss, finally found the strength to beg. But Verdi is not limited to this: it lets the choir enter over that melody, slowly, as a wave that wraps and exceeds the individual voice. The result is one of the most intense moments of the entire score. The solo quartet has found here a particularly successful balance: the soprano Yulia Tkachenko with a bright and penetrating line, the mezzo-soprano Mariangela Marini with a warm and deep timbre, the tenor Davide Giusti with a clear and well projected vocality and the bass Alessandro Abis with a strong timbre authoritativeness.

And when, after so many storms, the Pie Jesu, music finally seems to breathe. It is a simple, almost childish supplication, which asks mercy more than justice. Here the parallel with Manzoni becomes almost inevitable: as the Unknown who, after the night of conscience, discovers the possibility of forgiveness, so the Requiem Verdiano seems to arrive at a dimension of hope.

But Verdi does not give an easy conclusion. In Free me, Domine the solo soprano is back in front of the theme of Dies, returning as a shadow of memory. It is an extraordinary dramatic gesture. The composer does not erase the fear of judgment: he recalls it, reproposes it, almost to suggest that human consciousness can never get rid of it completely. Yet, through the final prayer, that fear seems to turn into something different: no more terror, but awareness.

And at that moment — while the choir suspends its voice between imploration and silence and the orchestra seems to hold the last breath — something happens that no musicological analysis can really explain. One has the feeling that that prayer no longer belongs to the Latin text, neither to Verdi's score, nor to the performers on stage. It becomes a question addressed to each of us. Not a question cried, but almost whispered, as happens in the most intimate hours of consciousness: if indeed, beyond the tumult of life and our fears, there may be a mercy capable of accepting man as it is, fragile, imperfect, but irreparably human.

When the last sound dissolved in the hall of the Teatro dell’Aquila, the audience remained for a few moments suspended in that silence that follows only the great musical experiences. Verdi, with his disarming irony, once said: «I don't know. Requiem be sacred or theatrical; I know only that it is true». And maybe this is the truth. — human before even religious — to make this work one of the leaders of Western music: a journey that, starting from the barter of conscience, stubbornly attempts to find the way to heaven.

30 March 2026

Photo © Elisa Prague

From the enchanted chaos of "The Sorcerer Entrepreneur" to the narrative clarity of "Pierino and the Wolf": a Family Concert of FORM that transforms listening into experience and the boys into interlocutors of music.

Senigallia, 22 March 2026

by Marialuisa Veneziano

Before the music begins, there is always a fragile and precious moment in which everything is still possible.

The lights hesitate, the caterpillar gets thinned, the theater holds the breath without declaring it. It is a time suspended, almost imperceptible, yet decisive: there we measure the quality of what is about to happen.

At the La Fenice Theatre in Senigallia, on Sunday, March 22, that moment had a particular density. It wasn't just waiting. It was helpful. Children prostheses towards the stage, children gathered in unexpected silence, families immersed in a quiet vigilant. Not a distracted audience, but an audience already listening before the sound was born.

And that changes everything.

Because when listening precedes music, music must not conquer: it can happen.

Many of those guys didn't get empty. They brought with them traces, previous encounters, sedimented insights. And so, from the first moment, what has been created has not been a simple relationship between who performs and who receives, but a relationship. A silent dialogue, ready to sound.

When the FORM – Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana – took place, led by the measured gesture of Jacopo Rivani, the concert — in a way — had already begun.

And when the first note crossed the hall, he did not find spectators.

He's got careful consciences.

It was a Family Concert. But in this definition there was no reduction: there was an opening. An act of trust. The idea that music, even in its complexity, can be inhabited by all — if you only create the right space.

Then the journey began.

With "The sorcerer apprentice".

And now the music has made itself a gesture.

An apprentice who dares too much, a formula that escapes, a broom that comes to life. The water that rises, which grows, does not stop anymore. But what makes this story so powerful is not history — is the way it is thought.

Paul Dukas builds the song as an organism that feeds itself. A minimal rhythm cell creeps into the orchestra and begins to proliferate. It repeats, expands, multiplies until it loses any possibility of control.

The broom is not an object.

It's a principle.

A rhythm that becomes destiny.

The bows put it in motion, the wood chases it, the brass amplify it until it becomes overwhelming. The orchestration does not describe the action: it generates it, pushes it, makes it inevitable.

And in this process there is a truth that goes beyond music: what we do not know how to rule grows to dominate us.

In this tension so alive, so proruptive, interpretation has chosen a more contained, more guarded way. The times, sometimes retained, have favoured clarity with respect to urgency, carefully returning what in Dukas' writing also lives and necessarily excess, almost feverish momentum.

And yet, precisely in this choice, the orchestra has shown considerable solidity. The sound was compact, the sections dialogue accurately, the sound planes were legible. A less overwhelming reading, perhaps, but aware, able to make intelligible, despite everything, complexity.

And the boys — exceptionally — They were inside all this.

They followed. They recognized. They were guessing.

They didn't get the music. They lived there.

Then, when the flow reached its limit — when chaos showed itself in its fullest form — the story has turned.

He didn't stop.

It's clear.

He went in "Pierino and the wolf."

And suddenly, the music took face.

With Sergei Prokofiev, every sound becomes identity. The flute flies light in the bird, the oboe waves in the duck, the clarinet moves furitive in the cat, the phagotto leans heavily in the grandfather, the horns open the shadow of the wolf.

And Pierino — the arches — He's not just a character.

It's a balance.

Lucia Palozzi's acting voice fits with intelligence, as a discreet thread that binds without stringing. He didn't explain: he accompanied. He didn't translate: he let it emerge.

And something rare happened.

The boys smiled before the sound was done. They were anticipating. They connected.

The cat is there.
The wolf is coming.
The bird is already flying.

It was no longer a concert.

It was a recognition.

And in that recognition something profoundly educational was accomplished.

Because culture is not what is explained.

That's what you recognize when you meet him.

And here then the bond, powerful, inevitable, between the two tracks.

In the first, music is growing matter, energy growing, strength escaping.
In the second, that same matter is organized, clarifies, lets itself be appointed.

It is the passage from chaos to form.

From experience to understanding.

From vertigo to consciousness.

And this — more than anything — is the heart of pedagogy.

The Filarmonica Marchigiana supported this path with professionalism and coherence, building a sound that did not seek the effect, but the sense. And in this, also the direction of Rivani — in his choice of containment — has maintained the thread of the speech, favoring readability, structure, clarity.

Then we understand.

It wasn't just a concert.

But an experience.

Of those that do not consume when they happen, but continue to work inside.

In the end, applause was not just a sign of enthusiasm.

They were an act of awareness.

As if the audience knew they had received something that didn't run out.

A rhythm that continues to turn.
A sound that remains.
An image that does not dissolve.

Because music, when he really meets the listener, doesn't end.

Deposit.

And from there — slowly slowly — It starts to turn.