The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio plays tonight at Rome’s Teatro dell’Opera. And then they’ll spend the next month traveling, so if you’re not in Rome catch them in Barcelona, New York, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, or Los Angeles in the coming month. Here’s why you should see them:
The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio consists of 16 musicians from 11 countries, 4 continents and 8 different languages who come together to create a novel kind of music.
It’s hard to tell which aim was most ambitious: creating an orchestra of thirty foreign musicians with unrelated instruments from different personal, popular-music backgrounds, or saving Rome’s early-twentieth-century Apollo Cinema from becoming a bingo hall and, instead, transforming it into a multi-media, multi-ethnic theater. In the case of the Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, it is safe to say that, at its purest and most devout, art begets art.
Filmmaker Agostino Ferrente and Avion Travel musician Mario Tronco, both native residents of the Piazza Vittorio neighborhood in Rome, endeavored to do both with the formation of The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio. Drawing from the artistic population of this old area, they fused cultures and traditions, old and new sounds, unknown instruments and more than sixty ethnic groups (more foreign residents than Italians) to bring distant-yet-universal melodies to the public ear.
The resulting sound is hard to categorize—especially considering the various instruments and diverse artistic and geographic backgrounds of the musicians. It’s more than World Music; it’s Neighborhood Music: folk, classical, pop, jazz and the undeniable tones of the street. The fact that each musician feels represented by this album truly gives the sense of the entire project.
The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio is already a sociological phenomenon welcomed enthusiastically by national and international media, studied by university professors, researchers and international conferences and celebrated by fans across the globe. Beyond its clear political and social value, the orchestra has become a mini-miracle of neighborhood and cultural initiative by bringing to the stage the traditions (musical and otherwise) from Tunisia, India, Africa, Cuba and beyond.
The story itself is a wildly popular film in Italy which depicts the epic five-year history of the orchestra, infused with ironic humor and astonishing persistence, as they struggle against ever-new obstacles, but ultimately succeed in creating this astounding musical group.
