Rome, 18 March 2012. The Teatro Valle has been occupied for nine months: on 14 June 2011 actors, musicians, technicians and directors entered the eighteenth-century hall, left without a manager after the abolition of the public body that ran it, and never left. A cellist, Giovanni Sollima, and a composer, Enrico Melozzi, whose name is in the web address of this magazine, had sent a simple invitation around social media: if you play the cello, come to the Valle. That evening, on the stage of the theatre where Rossini’s Cenerentola had received its first performance in 1817, there were a hundred cellos.
On 16 October 2026 at 8:30 pm that formula opens the music season of the Teatro Verdi in Pordenone. It is the first date in a programme that runs from October to June, with the music curated by Alessandro Taverna, and which the theatre presents as the programme of the year in which Pordenone will be Italian Capital of Culture. More than the season press release, what matters is a page on the theatre’s website titled Call to Play with the 100 Cellos: a form open to anyone who plays the cello, with the admitted categories listed one after another: professionals, students, amateurs. The theatre itself describes the 100 Cellos as an open orchestra that re-forms every time with different musicians.
It is the rule born at the Valle, and in fourteen years it has not changed. In 2012 the invitation circulated on social media, today it goes through an online form, but the principle is identical: at the first desk may sit a career soloist and at the last a second-year student, and between the two there may be someone who stopped studying twenty years ago and took the instrument out of the cupboard for the occasion. The line-up is not known until the last day, and the sound changes with the cities. The record made at the Valle in 2012, Live at Teatro Valle Occupato, released in April 2013, gives an idea of the range: the finale of Haydn’s Concerto in C, the Arioso from Bach’s Cantata BWV 156, Britten, Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, and alongside them Sollima’s Violoncelles, vibrez!, an Arbëresh song, songs by Tom Waits and Nirvana. The criterion is that of an orchestra that asks for no qualification to enter, from the audience or from the musicians. Writing for a hundred identical instruments and for hands of different levels is, however, a problem of craft, not of goodwill: the difficult passage cannot depend on everyone, the long note must hold together those with fewer hours of practice, and the whole must sound like an orchestra and not like an open rehearsal.
Since that March night the 100 Cellos have played in theatres and squares in Italy and abroad. On 8 September 2024, for MITO SettembreMusica, they were in Piazza San Carlo in Turin. The Valle, meanwhile, has had a more eventful history than the cellists who made it resound. The occupation ended on 11 August 2014 with an agreement between the occupiers and the City of Rome, and the hall stayed closed for works for a long time. The Teatro dell’Opera di Roma has announced that in October 2027 it will bring there Cenerentola in the same hall where it debuted. From that experience at the Valle also comes the idea from which the Orchestra Notturna Clandestina was born, which this magazine has covered: music played outside the expected circuits.
At Pordenone the project still carries the signature of Sollima and Melozzi. The exact number of cellists the theatre has not announced, at the time of writing: it depends on how many will have filled in the form.