Listening with his ears, not his eyes - an Italian Conductor in Ankara: A profile of Dario Lucantoni (BM)

 

 

 

If you “Google” Dario Lucantoni, the initial listings the search engine spits out are his film music credits, attesting to the pre-eminence of moving pictures over the theatre stage in this day and age. But then Dario Lucantoni is not your typical orchestra conductor, either. Now a full professor of conducting at the State Conservatory L. Recife of Frosinone and an active conductor who performs throughout Italy, his focus on this profession was hardly clear from the outset.

 

As a student at the St. Cecilia Conservatory in his native Rome, where he was born in 1960, Lucantoni tried his hand(s) – and his voice at several trades, studying piano, composition, conducting and singing. Some of his most illustrious teachers, in Rome as well as in Assisi, Fiesole and Pescara were none other than personalities like Bruno Aprea, Leonard Bernstein, Zoltan Pesko, Franco Ferrara and Donato Renzetti. In 1985 he won First Prize in the “Franco Capuana” European conducting competition in Rome. His first steps as a professional musician led him into many different fields, as an accompanist and piano coach, chorus master, solo tenor, assistant conductor and also as a composer.

Which explains the Google results: Dario Lucantoni has composed the music for several films, the most well-known of which is probably “Il Portaborse”(The Factotum) starring Nanni Moretti and shown in Cannes in 1991, not to mention the road movie “Compagna di Viaggio” (Traveling Companion) of 1996, “Le Mani Forti”(The Grey Zone) of 1997, “I Piccoli Maestri” (Little Teachers) of 1998 and many more. Nevertheless, conducting has always been more important to him, providing the connection to other musicians and the music itself that he values so much – “as opposed to composing a film score, which means holing myself up in a room and not going out or even answering the telephone for days on end!”

And indeed, over the years he has led many a well-known orchestras and worked with renowned musicians. The list is long, but to name just a few, there have been the Arturo Toscanini Symphony Orchestra – in Parma at the first Verdi Festival in the Teatro Reggio - the Genova State Opera Orchestra, the Arena di Verona Orchestra, the Spoleto Lyric Orchestra, the Orchestra of the State Opera “La Fenice” in Venice. The prominent artists include Renato Bruson, Vincenzo La Scola, Cecilia Gasdia, Denia Mazzola, Silvie Valayre, Zachos Terzakis and Roberto Servile.

 

So how does someone like this wind up in Turkey? Because he believes in taking on challenges, in being passionate about what he does and in trying to make a difference. While continuing to honor his commitments in Frosinone, Dario Lucantoni has also been acting as Ankara’s new General Music Director (recruited with the support of the Italian Culture Institute in Turkey’s capital) for the past year, and is already acknowledged as the vibrant personality responsible for putting two lesser-known one-act operas on the bill in the Turkish capital. Having already spent a year at Ankara’s Opera House as a piano coach and permanent guest conductor in the 1980’s (much like young Alessandro Cedrone, his student who he recently brought to Ankara as chorus master), he still speaks quite fluent Turkish and has many long-standing Turkish friends. “It helps when you learn a language in the prime of life, when memory still serves - sometimes I even catch myself thinking in Turkish!” he exclaims. “I came here because it is an opportunity for me to leave a mark.”  Moreover, he is convinced that his ensemble has great potential, despite the tradition whereby its members are granted life-long civil servant status after trial employment lasting a mere two years, which he feels is stifling for many of his musicians: “I would like to help them change the law, which is a veritable cancer, committing singers to the same theater for the whole of their career. These are fine artists, many of them very young, who love and are dedicated to their work – but you can’t blame them for becoming exasperated or even bored when nothing ever changes”.  His dream is to create an opera school in Ankara for singers, pianists, accompanists, opera prompters and conductors alike, as well as to generate private sponsorship to build a new theater, “because the present one is quite beautiful to look at, but too small for a capital city, not to mention the poor acoustics - and the fact that it has to cater to ballet, opera and concert performances on one and the same stage doesn’t help”.

Most opera-goers in Turkey are at best familiar with the famous aria “O mio babbino caro” from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, and have never even heard of Rota’s La Notte di un Nevrastenico. Lucantoni successfully staged both operas for the very first time in Ankara, together with Italian director Rocco Mortelliti, who set them in the historic period envisaged by the composer. “We thought about trying a 70’s ‘flower-power’ version at first, but then discarded the idea when we realized it might not be so easy for a Turkish audience to relate to, since hippies were hardly a common sight in this country.” The works are pure theater set to music, making it an enormous, even outrageous challenge for a Turkish ensemble to master this tremendous amount of Italian text – “una cosa pazzesca per loro!” Lucantoni expostulates, but then goes on to say that he “chose these operas knowing that if our ensemble could do this, we would move on to even greater things, and so we shall!” Besides, he just recently led his company in an outstanding production of Aida at the Aspendos International Ballet and Opera Festival in Southern Turkey, recruiting Raffaella Angeletti, the Ethiopian princess of this summer’s Macerata Festival, to sing the title role – but in the second cast following a Turkish soprano who sung at the premiere, thus reviving the tradition whereby Pavarotti himself appeared as second or third cast tenor in Ankara productions of La Bohème many years ago.

 

So for now, Lucantoni's life moves back and forth between Italy and Turkey, his office in Ankara with its clutter of boxes, suitcases and instruments somehow resembling his apartment in Rome, though it has to be said that the latter is also home to his prized collection of Grundig CD-players and speakers from the 1980’s (talk about the prime of life - those were the days). He seldom tires of showing off their incomparable sound to visitors, with Ella Fitzgerald crooning songs that naturally go back even further in time than these “gadgets”. After his final demonstration of the ultimate acoustic effect produced by I can’t recall which box, he sits back blissfully concluding that “there IS a meaning to life”.

 

Verità scomode, uncomfortable truths, is the title of one of the links on a website he points me to, set up by a Grundig aficionado who scorns all the fancy, showy (mostly Japanese) devices that have been put on the market over the past few decades. Doubtless there are also some uncomfortable truths about dealing with management issues at a Turkish opera house. By and large, the government’s wish to project a European image works in favor of supporting the arts, including classical music, liberating artists from the constant fear of the budget cuts that haunt operas elsewhere in Europe nowadays, but things are not always quite that straightforward either. Nonetheless, the opportunity to work with many promising and devoted musicians in Ankara makes Lucantoni’s job worthwhile, notwithstanding the chronic lack of decent pasta and nice fizzy water in Turkey.

No doubt we would all do well not to take things at face value, to choose the less-traveled road over the easy way out once in a while - and, as the Verità scomode website encourages its visitors, to listen with our ears rather than our eyes, “ascoltare con le orecchie, non con gli occhi”. Or, to close on yet another cinematic note, qualunque cosa farai, ama la – whatever you choose to do, be passionate about it – as we are taught in Cinema Paradiso.

 

Bettina Mara