by the Melos editorial staff
The Orchestra Notturna Clandestina was founded in 2016 to play Mozart where Mozart is not played. On 15 November it closes the Romaeuropa Festival in the largest concert hall in Italy.
On 30 April 2018, at six in the evening, in an occupied building on via di Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, an orchestra that no institution had invited began to play and stopped twelve hours later, at six in the morning on 1 May. Thirty concerts, musicians of every age and from half of Europe, tickets at twenty euros with a clause you do not read in theatres: those who do not have the money get in anyway. Guest of honour Giovanni Sollima, who at some point in the night conducted twelve cellists of 100Cellos. It was called the Clandestine Rave of Classical Music, and the word rave, that evening, was not a publicity stunt: it described exactly what was happening inside that building.
Eight years later, on 15 November 2026, the same orchestra closes the Romaeuropa Festival in the Sala Santa Cecilia of the Auditorium Parco della Musica, two thousand eight hundred seats, in collaboration with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. The title is The Classical Rave Party. Clandestinity, evidently, has won the case.
The story begins before 2016, and it begins in another occupied building.
In 2012, at the Teatro Valle, Enrico Melozzi and Giovanni Sollima bring together a hundred cellos. It was not a symbolic number, it was a hundred people with a hundred instruments inside the oldest theatre in Rome, withdrawn for three years from its administrative purpose. From that experience, which nobody had planned and which nobody managed to repeat elsewhere in the same form, comes the idea that an orchestra can exist outside the circuit that decides who plays.
The Orchestra Notturna Clandestina was constituted in Rome in 2016. Forty-five musicians, mostly under thirty, with Brazilian, Argentine, Ukrainian, Spanish, Polish and Colombian passports. The name comes not from electronic music but from the theatre: from the Teatro Clandestino that Tadeusz Kantor kept alive in Kraków under the Nazi occupation, rehearsing in private apartments performances the authorities would have banned. To call an Italian orchestra of the twenty-first century by that name is a statement of method. Music is made where it is possible to make it, not where it is expected to be made.
The repertoire, from day one, runs from Mozart to Nirvana by way of Pergolesi, and that still makes some noses wrinkle. It is worth remembering that Mozart wrote dance music for the gaming halls of Vienna and that Don Giovanni was welcomed in Prague the way a record everyone is waiting for is welcomed today. The idea that this music belongs to a separate sphere is recent, little more than a century old, and the composers did not invent it.
Anyone who has seen one of the orchestra’s concerts knows that the first thing to go is protocol.
Melozzi speaks to the audience before the pieces, in everyday Italian, without the lecture tone. He plays in the midst of the others instead of standing in front of them. One critic has called him an anti-conductor, and the definition works as long as it is read the right way: there is no renunciation of the craft, the orchestra is prepared as orchestras are prepared, there are rehearsals, parts, entrances. The apparatus falls away, not the work.
This is the part of the project that interests Melos most, because it touches the point we keep insisting on: the inferiority complex of the Italian public in front of art music is not a natural fact, it is a historical product. Someone, at a certain moment, decided that to sit in that hall you had to know certain things. The Orchestra Notturna Clandestina works from the opposite side, on the conviction that the audience is not asked to understand but to let itself be carried.
The first rave, in 2018, draws thousands of people.
The second, on 30 April 2019, returns to the Santa Croce Auditorium of Spin Time Labs and raises the stakes: twelve hours, some forty concerts, over a hundred musicians, half the programme devoted to Mozart, from Symphony No. 25 to the Fortieth dressed in brass, timpani, mandolin and African drums, up to the finale of Don Giovanni. In between, the world premiere of Melozzi’s Don Giovanni all’Inferno, the clarinet of Alessandro Carbonare, the piano of Giuseppe Andaloro, the flamenco of Livio Gianola. Rai Radio 3 broadcasts live. An audience that is almost never seen in opera houses stays awake until dawn to listen to music written two hundred and fifty years ago.
Then comes 2020 and the halls close. The rave, which was the most fragile and most contagious form of the project, stops. The orchestra does not: in 2021 the Milan section is born, and the ONC becomes the first distributed orchestra in Italy, two cores that compose and decompose depending on the programme. The Ravenna Festival arrives, the Macerata Opera Festival, the Notte della Taranta at Melpignano, the recordings for Decca, the stages of Sanremo. The same person who conducts an orchestra inside an occupied building conducts the final of the Italian Song Festival, and neither is a concession to the other.
The Classical Rave Party closes the forty-first edition of the Romaeuropa Festival, which this year lines up more than ninety shows and about a thousand artists.
On the stage of the Sala Santa Cecilia, at 8 pm, the Orchestra Notturna Clandestina with Giovanni Sollima, Niccolò Fabi, Alessandro Baricco, the Banda dell’Esercito Italiano, the pianos of Giuseppe Andaloro and Gloria Campaner, and then Elsa Lila, Anastasio, Fasma. Tickets from thirty to forty euros. The festival’s official presentation explicitly recalls the season of the Roman nights of 2018 and 2019, the one the virus interrupted.
The interesting point is not the list of guests. It is that a hall built for the ritual of the symphonic concert will host for one evening the form that ritual has always kept outside the door: the long duration, the audience that comes and goes, art music treated as a party and not as a ceremony. It is not a historical novelty, it is a return. Beethoven’s academy of 22 December 1808 lasted more than four hours in a freezing theatre, and contained two new symphonies, a piano concerto, pieces of a mass and, to close, the Choral Fantasy, finished only a few days earlier. We will talk about it soon, on these pages, along with other equally immoderate nights.
One question remains that nobody has yet asked out loud, and that we ask: what does an orchestra that is born clandestine and ends up in the largest hall in the country become. There are two possible answers. The first is that the institution absorbs, that the rave becomes a show with the rave inside it, tamed by the numbered seat. The second is that the orchestra walks in bringing its own night with it, and that it is the hall that changes place. On 15 November, from 8 pm onwards, we will see which of the two.