Note di Marco Tullio Giordana:

“SCARLATTI K.259 is a small satellite film, born on the sidelines of the filming of the film DUE SOLDATI, shot in Castel Volturno in the summer of 2016.

Thanks to the director Mauro Felicori I had the opportunity to visit, despite being closed to the public, the Court Theater of the Royal Palace of Caserta, started by Vanvitelli in 1753 and inaugurated in 1769. The beauty of the place and the incredible acoustics gave me the idea of a small musical film, something I could make in a few hours, outside the normal working hours.

I involved a dear friend, the guitarist Antonio Mascolo, a native of those parts, to perform something coherent with that theatre, with Naples, with the eighteenth century. We immediately thought of Scarlatti, Mascolo chose the Sonata K.259 in G major, very difficult and rarely performed.

Taking advantage of my crew, especially the Sound and Editing departments, we shot using only the theater hall lights. Three directional microphones have been placed away from the instrument, in order to recreate the acoustic conditions of live listening, rather than chasing those of the recording room. There is therefore no amplification and the performance enjoys only the sounding board that the Theater naturally offers to the instrumentalist. Since it was not possible to predict where to "cut" the shots, Mascolo repeated the piece every time the small digital camera changed position, so as to then allow me maximum freedom during the editing. However, it was necessary for the interpreter to play the piece in exactly the same way every time, with the same tempo, the same metronome, the same cavata.

The skill of this young guitarist made it possible to enter/exit the various takes with the utmost ease, either to tell the relationship with Vanvitelli's architecture, or to highlight the complexity of the fingering or the attack techniques of the right hand, interesting, I hope , not only for fans of this instrument but also for the ordinary spectator. As is known, Scarlatti wrote K.259 for harpsichord, and not for guitar, even if in many of the 555 Sonatas the echo of the guitar idiom heard during his long stay in Spain is very present. With a not too deceptive license, one can think of listening to a Scarlatti transcribed for guitar in the same conditions in which Ferdinando and Carolina could have listened to it the day after the inauguration of their magnificent Theater.”

Marco Tullio Giordana

BACK