Ambrogiolo

Ambrogiolo will be premiered September 10, 11, 12 and 17,18,19 - 8pm - Thick House Theather, San Francsico
as part of the Opera Collaboration DieciGiorni

Ambrogiolo is inspired by a tale from Giuseppe Boccaccio's Decameron, the seminal book marking the transition from the late Middle ages to the Renaissance. The Decameron (literally the Ten Days) is composed of a hundred tales, told over a ten days period by ten fictional noble-men and -women, taking refuge from the Plague raging in Florence. Each day has a theme, and the tale I put in music is from day two: devoted to events which start badly but end up for the best.

Ambrogiolo's tale, the ninth from day two, narrates a rather complex story: one of a husband overconfident about his wife loyalty, of a treacherous man (Ambrogiolo) tricking him into believing that his wife is not so, and the resulting tragedy of jealousy. The tale inspired Shakespeare's play Cymbeline, and it has such an array of characters, themes, and events that is could be tilted easily in different directions: from an Otello to Così fan tutte. I decided to keep the story as close to the original as possible, adding a bit more focus on the Ambrogiolo character (the deceiver), while husband and wife are to the sides, picking up the pieces of their disrupted life.

Compositionally Ambrogiolo is characterized by a rather varied but very sparse treatment of the orchestral accompaniment. There is a combination of standard orchestral support of the voices, sections in which the instruments take part in the dialogue as independent voices, periodically creating fairly dense counterpoint, and other sections in which the instruments act as soloists.

(GPO)