A specific initiative for which the “Bonporti” Conservatory of Trento is the main organizer is Screening Sounds: Re-imaging Speech, involving the Orchestra of Padua and Veneto (OPV) and three ensembles – the Italian Divertimento Ensemble, the Belgian Ensemble21, and the Swedish KammarensembleN – in a series of concerts focused on a unique musical theme: the exploration of the rhythms and inflections of spoken voice in music performed solely by instruments. Overall, the initiative includes commissions from sixteen Italian composers and six international ones, and involves four Italian conservatories and four foreign academies.

For this triple event – in Padua on 30th October, in Rovigo on 31st and in Zagreb (Croatia) on 12th November – OPV will perform a new work commissioned by “Bonporti” from Croatian composer Berislav Šipuš. The piece, titled “…at the end of your long journey…”, is inspired by a line from a poem by Italian poet Dacia Maraini and is composed for orchestra and electronics.

Šipuš’s work (read more here ) will have its world premiere in Padua, as part of the OPV’s 60th concert season, on October 30 at 8:45 PM at the Pollini Auditorium, conducted by Michael Hofstetter. It will then be performed again in Zagreb (Croatia) at the Blagoje Bersa Concert Hall (University and Academy of Music) on November 12 at 7 PM, under the baton of Marcello Bufalini. During the Croatian performance, the concert program also includes Background checks, written by composer Fabio Cifariello Ciardi. Commissioned in 2019 by the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trento, it refers to an event that occurred in the United States a few years earlier.

On January 5, 2016, at the White House, Barack Obama delivered one of his final speeches as President on the topic of background checks — the controls that, in the United States, should always precede the sale of any firearm — while commemorating the 20 students and 6 adults killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

It was a speech unlike most. The Washington Post described it as “President Obama’s amazingly emotional speech on gun control.” Obama clearly had notes, but he did not seem to be reading from them, nor did he appear to be using a teleprompter — the device speakers often rely on to maintain eye contact with the audience. The result was a speech that was unique, moving, and passionate.

Background checks “amplifies” and projects the President’s voice into the orchestra — his inflections, the tension of rhythm and pauses in his speech. It creates a utopian mimesis between the spoken voice and the instruments, in the illusion of translating into sound something of the inner life that animates the speaker: perhaps even glimpses of the thoughts that precede and follow the spoken word.

Large portions of Obama’s speech form a prologue, three sections, and a coda — all interrupted at various points by a kind of refrain, which only in its final appearance reveals its true purpose: to prompt us to frame the theme within a broader and more tragically familiar perspective