On Tuesday 28 May, at 8.30 p.m., the Orchestra UNIMI returns to the Sala Verdi of the Conservatorio Verdi in Milan for its customary annual collaboration. Sebastiano Rolli will conduct the Orchestra – along with soloists Elisa Bonazzi mezzo-soprano, Alessio Tosi and Michele Concato tenors, Giacomo Serra baritone and Alessandro Ravasio bass – in two pieces that investigate and restore to the public the profound understanding that bound Kurt Weill, one of the most significant voices of the dramatic lacerations of the twentieth century, to the poet Bertolt Brecht, both moved by the desire to represent without hypocrisy the alienated life of modern man.

The evening will be opened by the performance of Das Berliner Requiem (1929), one of the great masterpieces born from the brilliant partnership between Weill and Brecht. The project, a cycle of pieces for male voices and orchestra on Brecht’s poems, was created in 1929 at the request of the Reich Radio Symphony Society to create a work specifically designed for radio broadcasting. The opera tells the stories of the forgotten dead, victims of faceless wars or victims of violent crimes whose bodies have never been found.

This will be followed by the performance – for the first time in Italy – of the version elaborated in 2019 by HK Gruber and C. Muthspiel of Die sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins – 1933), for female voice, two tenors, two basses and orchestra. The opera, composed in the years of the rise of Nazism to a libretto by Bertolt Brech, is a merciless reflection on capitalist society whose illusions were swept away by the economic crisis of 1929 that swept first the United States and then Europe.

The concert will be preceded, at 7.15 p.m., by a conversation between the artists and Livio Aragona, musicologist and professor specialized in Italian opera and the music of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Free admission with prior booking: https://orchestraunimi280524.eventbrite.it