“Cento chiodi”: Maestro Ermanno Olmi collaborates again with Maestro Fabio Vacchi

On  March 30, 2007,  “Cento chiodi”, the latest movie written and directed by Ermanno Olmi, was released at movie theaters.  Olmi asked Maestro Fabio Vacchi, to compose the original soundtrack for this movie.  The collaboration, in fact, was already a successful one in 2001, with the movie “Il mestiere delle armi” that won, the David di Donatello award for the best soundtrack in 2001.

The movie, which according to the director born in Bergamo will be his last as narrator, talks about a young, but accomplished, professor of religious philosophy (played by Raz Degan) who leaves his job at the University in Bologna after an existential, mystic and moral crisis that takes him on a journey  through nature towards an individual freedom in search for the reply to his doubts.  He leaves the city and goes to live in an old cottage along the banks of the Po River  where he is able to understand and create a certain bonding with the local population.  The passage to a new type of life is sealed by the scene in which he crucifies the pages of the most prestigious religious texts of the ancient and precious university library, on the walls of a room in the faculty where he teaches.

The same nails as those used in the Crucifixion are used by a Christological Ermanno Olmi to  underline the written thought,  a subversion that has a double meaning. In fact, the director believes that Jesus Christ rebelled against the rules, in the temple, and against his martyrdom.  Two points, on the other hand, that the ideologies and religion now impose, depriving man of the fundamental right of freedom.  And they do it through the presumed knowledge of books (“how much truth was written in those texts….why were they written?  To fool us.  There is more truth in a caress than in all books put together”).  A  sort of fraud that causes suffering and distracts us from what really matters, the pleasure of a simple life, in harmony with others and with the Earth.

One of the greatest directors in the Italian film industry, Olmi leaves us with a elegiac, extratemporal movie, full of poetic details (the sun that rises over the grass, the contrasting currents of water on the river surface, the fog on the river banks) created by the photographic talent of his son, Fabio.

In this sense, the upcoming movies currently in the making by the director are indicative of his interests (he now returns to making documentaries as in the beginning of his career): one is on “Terramadre”, a meeting in Turin with farmers from around the world so that their role in society returns to being fundamental, another is on the reconversion of the industrial areas in Sesto San Giovanni,  and the other on the search for happiness.

Maestro Fabio Vacchi:

Fabio Vacchi made his debut when he was very young at the Biennale in Venice. His compositions have been played in the most important theatres in Italy and abroad, and directed, among others by  Abbado, Muti, Metha, Chung, Fischer, Harding, Marriner, Berio. He has composed operas, symphonies, chamber music, soundtracks, and incidental music.

Some of his compositions include : Briefe Büchners (commissioned by C. Abbado for the Berliner Cycles, (1997); Dai calanchi di Sabbiuno, orchestration of the original chamber music requested by Claudio Abbado  (1997), played more than a hundred times world-wide;  Diario dello sdegno, commissioned by the La Scala Philharmonic and directed by Riccardo Muti on the international tour, Terra comune, directed by Myung-Whun Chung for the inauguration of the New Auditorium in Rome (2002).

In 2000, the Salzburger Festspiele commissioned Tre veglie, for  violoncello, female vocalist and orchestra.  The Salzburg Festival also commissioned for reciting vocalist and orchestra, played by the Wiener Philharmoniker directed by  R.Muti in August 2006.  Again in 2006, Vacchi wrote Voci di notte, for Zubin Mehta, part of the preview concert of the Maggio Fiorentino.  For theatre, he has written: the opera Reigen, by Schnitzler ( 1982, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino) Il Viaggio (1990, Teatro Comunale in Bologna); the opera La Station thermale, commissioned by the Opéra de Lyon that staged it 1993 and again in 1994 in 1995, and was then staged at the  Teatro alla Scala in Milan (1995), and from 1994 to 1997, at the Opéra Comique in Paris, and in numerous French theatres.  Faust, un poema coreografico, (1995, Feste Musicali Bolognesi). The ballet  Dionysos, (theatrically staged for the first time at the Settimana dell’Accademia Chigiana, 1998); the opera Les oiseaux de passage staged at the Opéra de Lyon in 1998, and again in October  2001 at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna; the one-act opera La burla universale, on a text by Franco Marcoaldi, commissioned by RAI Radio3 in 2001; the opera Il letto della storia, on a libretto by Franco Marcoaldi, Maggio Fiorentino 2003.

In 2007, two new operas will be staged:  in July, at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, La madre del mostro, on an original libretto by Michele Serra; in September, at La Scala, Teneke, on libretto by Franco Marcoaldi, an adaptation of the story written by Yashar Kemal, directed by Ermanno Olmi with stage designing by  Arnaldo Pomodoro.

He composed the music for the American tour in March 2007, of Macbeth, in the production given by the Caro Colla e Figli Marionette Company.  In April 2007, Antonio Pappano will be on tour with Mare, che fiumi accoglie, along with the Santa Cecilia orchestra.

Awards : Koussewitzky Prize in composition (1974); 1st prize at the Gaudeamus contest, The Netherlands(1976); David di Donatello award in 2002 for the soundtrack of Il mestiere delle armi by Ermanno Olmi; Lully Award 2002 for the best new track made in the United States  Uniti (Quartet n. 3, commissioned by the Tokyo Quartet);  Abbiati award given by  Italian critics for the best new composition of 2003 for the opera Il letto della storia; Colonna Sonora award given by the Ente Nazionale dello Spettacolo, for the soundtrack of the movie  Gabrielle by Patrice Chéreau.

He is a member of the National Academy of   Santa Cecilia.