FALCONE
Il tempo sospeso del volo

"It is precisely Pintor's narration that reminds us without discount of what Italy in the early 1990s experienced while watching TV and reading the newspapers. A sort of hyperrealism, but never an end in itself. The wreckage of the car blown up, the magistrate's papers, the agenda (a reminder of the later murder of Paolo Borsellino). But also the interviews and the maxi-trial, as well as the venom of his colleagues who conditioned Falcone's career and partially his work. All elements that shake consciences."

"Stefano Simone Pintor's direction supports the double real and symbolic nature of the performance: real in scenically describing the chasm caused by the bomb explosion on the Sicilian motorway at the junction for Capaci, symbolic in setting all the musical numbers of the opera in this hellish ruin, where the remains of the exploded cars rise, fall and act as props to recreate different environments, such as a restaurant table, the magistrate's office, a television studio, the bunker courtroom of the maxi-trial. In addition to the stage, the Social Theatre of Trento itself is also used as a stage setting: the boxes closest to the barcaccia contain the gratings in which the Mafia men are imprisoned during the trial, and a few extras wander around the stalls, confused among the audience who, by surprise, begin to take part in the action. In short, Pintor's directing team (Gregorio Zurla at the sets, Alberto Allegretti at the costumes, Fiammetta Baldisseri and Virgino Levrio at the lights, Francesco Mori at the videos) has done a very fine job."

"It is that frightening image, realistically reconstructed by set designer Gregorio Zurla on the stage of Trento's Teatro Sociale, that welcomes the audience to Falcone. Il tempo sospeso del volo, a civil music theatre by Nicola Sani, produced by the Fondazione Haydn di Trento e Bolzano as part of Opera Festival 2022. The successful staging, curated by Stefano Simone Pintor, complements and animates that narrative flow with emotionally marking images and situations in the fixed space of the stage masterfully lit by Fiammetta Baldiserri and Virginio Levrio. A scene that goes beyond the fourth wall and penetrates the stalls, almost as if to create a bridge between that story and the spectators' consciousness. After the Prologue with the black-and-white images of the magistrate's tragic, last journey, from the flight that takes him from Ciampino to Punta Raisi and then to the motorway race towards death, marked by the screens that turn white and show the fatal hour (the highly edited videos are by Francesco Mori), the flow of memory opens, whose narrative pivot is Falcone, played with heartfelt adhesion by the bass Roberto Scandiuzzi. Around him, the fragments of memory of the work's 26 scenes are animated by the plethora of characters who have crossed and sometimes hindered his existential path - friends, fellow magistrates, journalists, mafiosi - to whom the two other basses Gabriele Ribis and Salvatore Grigoli and actors Claudio Lobbia and Angelo Romagnoli give voice and body."

"In Trento, the staging curated by Stefano Simone Pintor, with scenes created by Gregorio Zurla, and lighting support by the expert Fiammetta Baldiserri, project the spectator into the crater created by the motorway explosion: the presence of the car wreckage as reported in the news, the Palermo-Capaci directional signs (later transformed into monitors for the video of the last flight). A direction that is also attentive to single gestures such as the handover of the famous 'red agenda', with its torn pages, the voices of an indifferent Palermo, like the one participating in the changing events. The stage is projected right into the stalls with a catwalk that creates a narrative track between audience and actors."

"The complex musical elaboration by Sani, who has always been attentive to innovation and experimentation, includes an extensive presence of electronics with real-time processing and spatialisation techniques on multiple channels, with live electronics and with interventions recorded on multi-channel digital media. In the same way, the work of director Stefano Simone Pintor takes shape, who prepares a performance imagined all around the spectators: the performers act on stage but at the same time interact with the bystanders in the middle of the stalls, also involving the onlookers in the tragedy in action, while the orchestra, located at the back of the stage, takes on the features of a further character involved in the action. The sets designed by Gregorio Zurla make the performance even more emotionally and artistically impactful. The stage hosts the destruction wrought by the 500 kilograms of TNT: the crashed cars occupy the entire space, the ground shows the tragic crater reported in the chronicles, screens evoke road signs or project videos of the area between Punta Raisi airport, Capaci and Palermo, while scattered documents lie on the ground evoking Falcone's profound devotion to his task."

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2