by the Melos Chorus
Second instalment of the portrait of Giovanni Sollima. A cellist, a composer and an orchestra that took the name of a forbidden theatre.
On the evening of 18 March 2012 the Teatro Valle in Rome has been under occupation for nine months. Giovanni Sollima and Enrico Melozzi have sent a two-line invitation around the internet: anyone who plays the cello, come to the Valle. On the stage where Rossini’s La Cenerentola was born in 1817 a hundred of them turn up, professionals beside students, amateurs beside orchestral principals. The record made that evening, Live at Teatro Valle Occupato, comes out in April 2013 and brings together Haydn, Bach, Debussy, Britten, Sollima’s Violoncelles, vibrez!, an Arbëresh song, Tom Waits and Nirvana.
It is the birth certificate of the 100 Cellos, and at the same time the spark of something else. From that experience comes the idea that an orchestra can live outside the circuit that decides who plays and where. Four years later, in 2016, the Orchestra Notturna Clandestina takes shape in Rome, taking its name from Tadeusz Kantor’s Clandestine Theatre, which in Kraków, under the Nazi occupation, rehearsed in private apartments.
On 30 April 2018, at the first classical-music rave, Sollima is the guest of honour.
The Clandestine Classical Music Rave begins at six in the evening in an occupied building on via di Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, the Spin Time Labs space, and ends at six in the morning on 1 May. Thirty concerts, thousands of people, a twenty-euro ticket and free entry for anyone without the twenty euros. At one point in the night Sollima conducts twelve cellists of the 100 Cellos; at the piano, among others, is a twelve-year-old girl from Palermo, Carlotta Maestrini, whom we shall meet again in these pages. The following year, on 30 April 2019, the rave returns to the same building and doubles: some forty concerts, more than a hundred musicians, Rai Radio 3 live, and again Sollima and Melozzi sharing the podium.
The relationship between the two has a curious shape, which anyone who has seen them together recognises at once. Sollima plays, Melozzi plays among the others and talks to the audience; both write for forces that exist in no manual, a hundred identical instruments, hands of different levels, a hall that must hold up for twelve hours. In 2014 Melozzi dedicates The Sound of the Falling Walls to Sollima. The 100 Cellos, meanwhile, tour Italy and abroad, from Piazza San Carlo in Turin for MITO SettembreMusica in 2024 to the hypogeum of Teramo in July 2026, and on 16 October of this year they open the season of the Teatro Verdi in Pordenone with the same rule as the Valle: anyone who plays the cello can sign up.
For Sollima the Sala Santa Cecilia is home: he has taught at the Accademia since 2010.
Then 2020 switches everything off. The rave, which was the most fragile and most contagious form of the project, stops, and for six years remains a memory shared by those who were there. It returns on Sunday 15 November 2026, under another name and on another scale: The Classical Rave Party closes the Romaeuropa Festival in the Sala Santa Cecilia of the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, in collaboration with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, for the tenth anniversary of the Orchestra Notturna Clandestina.
The day follows the geography of that story. It opens in the morning with the 100 Cellos, the group born at the Valle; it continues with the music of Philip Glass, the producer of Sollima’s first record; and at 8 pm it leaves the hall to the orchestra, with Sollima among the guests alongside Niccolò Fabi, Alessandro Baricco and the Italian Army Band. From the occupied stage of 2012 to the largest hall of the Parco della Musica, fourteen years have passed, and the two cellos that sent out the invitation are still the same.
The third and final instalment of the portrait will go back three centuries, to Giovanni Battista Costanzi, the Roman cellist whom Sollima has brought back to light. Tickets for 15 November at romaeuropa.net, TicketOne and Vivaticket.