Two Prophets of PeaceThe Miracle of Consolation
Publish date 18-11-2024
The unforgettable Giuseppe Sinopoli, a world-famous conductor who passed away in 2001, firmly believed in the social function of music. Inaugurating his project Music in Hospitals at the Policlinico Gemelli, he said: «The miracle of music lies precisely in this: that it is like a light that enters all the spaces of the temple of our soul.
This light is above all consolation: in the sometimes unbearable silence of solitude in which the state of illness often locks us, music becomes a traveling companion, takes us by the hand and in compassion accompanies us for a stretch of our existence».
And what to do when childhood is imprisoned in a hospital room? Brutally interrupted by illness, which steals the time of carefreeness and mercilessly takes away the space for games, imposing cruel prohibitions and restrictions incomprehensible to any child: forbidden to sweat, jump in puddles, climb on walls or throw yourself down a slide. Illness bends and suffocates the vivacity of those who should discover the world by skinning their knees without fear, challenging the rules of adults to conquer step by step their own identity and autonomy. The answer is given to us once again by music, capable of comforting for a few moments the spirit of the little ones and their parents, and it is precisely the spirit, as Sinopoli reminds us, that «allows us to process the pain, to overcome the difficult reality to proceed towards goals illuminated by the utopia of hope».
With this aim, last June 8, the Laboratorio del Suono visited the young patients of the Regina Margherita. Andrea Vigliocco's World junior band really did its best to give the hospitalized children and their families a few minutes of energetic lightheartedness, to the notes of Made you look by Meghan Trainor, Stay with me by Sam Smith and Try by Pink. The strings led by Luciana Valeriani instead revealed moments of pure beauty drawing from the classical repertoire, with pieces by Handel, Telemann, Vivaldi and above all with the famous canon of Pachelbel, which with its marvelous architecture, built on a simple musical cell that repeats itself in increasingly complex variations, gives us back the cyclical sense of life, which always finds a way to unfurl the sails and set off again, sometimes capturing even just a faint breath of wind. The wind of hope.
Mauro Tabasso
with Valentina Giaresti
NP August / September