Beethoven in Vermont

“The great thing is the originality of the evening … and that the performers are simultaneously actors and musicians with a rare and extraordinary ease.

70 minutes flowing vibrantly between the beautiful notes of Beethoven’s most famous Trios, Spettri and Arciduca, and the captivating texts excellently recited by the three performers, dressed in casual American style.

The show was directed by the talented Maria Letizia Compatangelo.

An evening spent with a large youthful audience in attendance made our now elderly eyes twinkle in the face of such enthralling and brilliant music”.

– Corriere PL

In the summer of 1951, in the aftermath of the Second World War, three musicians exiled from Germany have to decide on the programme for the inaugural concert of what they feel is a gamble that synthesises their lives, their artistic union and the path that brought them there: from the rejection of Nazism and voluntary exile, to the repudiation of German citizenship and emigration to the United States: the Marlboro Festival, a new way of studying, teaching and making music in freedom.

Amidst performances of pieces, disagreements and contrasting opinions, the show imagines the exchange of musical and human ideas between Adolf Busch, Rudolf Serkin and Hermann Busch in front of their young American pupils, until they make up to the choice of Beethoven, the musician par excellence bearer of the ideals of brotherhood and collaboration between peoples, and the Op. 97 “The Archduke”, his last Trio, a bridge to future masterpieces.

Mario Loguercio, Angelo and Francesco Pepicelli play and act to a text and direction by the award-winning playwright, essayist and director Maria Letizia Compatangelo, in a musical performance that inaugurates, perhaps for the first time, a new declination of the concept of ‘recitar suonando’.