Rigoni Stern's spare prose meets the timelessness of Alpine songs.
Mario Rigoni Stern tells the story of the Russian retreat of January 1943 with prose that does not seek heroism but finds it — in exhaustion, in cold, in the quiet solidarity of ordinary soldiers. Roberto Squinzi brings those pages to life with the voice of someone who understands the weight of words.
Accompanying the reading, traditional Alpine songs — Signore delle Cime, Ta-pum, Sul Ponte di Perati and others — rearranged in an early-music style by Francesco Maffeis and Mauro Ghilardini, drawing on Monteverdi-era polyphony: intertwining voices, harmonies suspended in time, free of any rhetorical nostalgia.
The result is a show that does not illustrate the book but inhabits it: the spare power of Stern's writing and the timelessness of the songs sustain each other, leaving the audience inside a silence that speaks.
Ancient voices for a modern story. Or perhaps the other way around.
The founding idea is simple and radical: Alpine songs not as a soundtrack but as a parallel text. Rearranged according to the grammar of early music — counterpoint, modality, vocal ornamentation — they shed every folkloristic varnish and return to what they always were: sophisticated music of the people, capable of standing alongside Stern's prose without being overshadowed. Francesco Maffeis (piano and voice), Mauro Ghilardini (keyboards and voice) and Sara Scolari (voice) form an ensemble that sings and plays as one.
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