Pasta Ka Rasta

Another fusion combo takes a multi-city tour in August when Duo Alterno of Turin—soprano Tiziana Scandaletti with pianist-composer Riccardo Piacentini—will present important early 20th century composers and a selection of texts from Rabindranath Tagore and Italian freedom poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. (Fete de la Musique, or Music Day, was initiated in France in 1982 by the then French Minister of Culture, Jacques Lang. It flowed out of France in 1985 and is now celebrated in more than 80 countries).

In all, the Italian programme for India is solid enough to make most culture junkies smack their lips: Music, contemporary art, theatre and cinema, a re-emphasis on the Italian language, seminars, workshops, conferences, (particularly the one on the first poet of the Renaissance, Petrarch) and an exhibition on the links between ancient Rome and India.

Says Antonio Armellini, the new Italian ambassador to India: “The cultural dimension has always played a vital role in Indo-Italian relations, not only because both countries are heirs to great ancient civilisations, but also because culture is considered by them an essential vehicle for the spreading of ideas, customs and habits, so distant and different from each other.”

The details are many and scrumptious, but some inter-civilisational points arise. One, the quality of exchange. India usually sends her best abroad, despite the undeserving few who swing international tours through political or bureaucratic favour. But the best of the West often stays away from India because of inadequate infrastructure.

Last year’s much-appreciated opera performance of The Barber of Seville in Delhi by the Salerno Municipal Theatre had a behind-the-scenes story of unused sets and equipment because Delhi’s biggest hall, Siri Fort, did not have the stage for it (Unforgettable: When the Martha Graham Company rehearsed there in 1991, one dancer said with American candour, “This place is a dump!”).

But hopefully, stagers of Gaetano Donizetti’s 19th century opera The Elixir of Love, slated for November, will have demanded stage specifications beforehand and come prepared. Elixir is a comedy about a peasant Nemorino, who is in love with a landowner Adina and desperately needs a miracle to attract her attention.

Though full of fun and froth, the music, thankfully, is better than The Fakir of Benares, which is nice for tourism but not a good introduction to opera.

The point for the West, as the late music critic Dr Raghava Menon frequently lamented, is that we can do with simpler sets because we come from a classical tradition of ekaharya (the solo dancer building structures in time through rhythm cycles rather than structures in space like ballet). But we’d like the music to be the best.

However, Armellini is confident that Brand Italy will take well here: “We think we have fine opera, which will work well in India, though we leave the big symphonies to our Germanic friends.”

Indeed, a whole world of joyous discovery awaits us, if the logistics don’t overwhelm the performance because the themes and temperaments are beautifully attuned. Sometimes in reverse, too. Our own prima assoluta Yamini Krishnamurti recalls dancing a Kuchipudi fragment of ‘Bhama Kalapam’ in Naples back in the ’70s to an appreciative audience that straightaway recognised and responded to both the operatic nature of Kuchipudi and its wilful, imperious heroine Satyabhama. “I drove off into the Neapolitan night with cries of ‘Brava!’ and ‘Bellissima!’ ringing in my ears,” she says.

While huge Germanic orchestras may be difficult to bring here (one can’t help thinking wistfully, though, that on June 10, Mercedes-Benz sponsored the Berlin Philharmonic’s recital at the Ataturk Cultural Centre in Istanbul during the music festival there), Indians will nevertheless get to hear a pianist from one of the loveliest places on the map: Sicily.

The pianist Christian Leotta of Catania began learning the piano at the age of eight and studied further at the Conservatorio Verdi in Milan and from a number of maestros.

It is a pity he will play only in New Delhi, at the Nehru Memorial Centre on September 23 and not in cities such as Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai, which have a highly responsive audience for Western classical music.

In contemporary art, Navin Kishore of Seagull Arts and Media Resources Centre in Kolkata is organising an exhibition of works from 15 artists who once gathered in a picturesque street, the Via Margutta in the heart of Rome, in the post-WW II years. They hung out in addas and swapped horror stories of going underground, jail and exile: Artists such as Amerigo Tot, Corrado Cagli, Gino Severini and Giuseppe Capogrossi, film directors such as Luchino Visconti, writers such as Franco Ferrara and Ildebrando Pizzetti.

At the local trattoria, there were separate tables earmarked for this volatile bunch of full hearts and empty pockets, who paid for their meals with sketches or canvases or by painting on the walls.

Foreign luminaries like Salvador Dali of Barcelona, who came to savour Rome, would wander into Via Margutta and befriend them. One night Dali delighted and slightly alarmed them with a surreal lecture on flies: He was sure America had none, whereas he approved of Italian flies which seemed cleaner than their Spanish cousins.

Another night, Pablo Picasso came to dinner at film director Luchino Visconti’s. Out of that visit was born a vivid portrait of the city with a bright sword depicting Via Margutta. A young Sicilian musician, Franco Mannino, played the piano in the background and went on to compose the soundtracks for many of Visconti’s films.

As they wandered about the warm Roman nights, somebody would declaim from Homer’s Odyssey, somebody else would add or amend (sometimes it was writer Alberto Moravia, snapping out of a creative sulk). And finally, they would tumble starving into the studio of artist Amerigo Tot, who served them goulash in small terracotta cups.

In this group was a young woman, Eva Fisher, who painted bright pictures of Roman markets and told all these stories, besides acquiring a number of works by her friends. The Kolkata exhibition of the Via Margutta group will come from her collection.

“We have a huge resource of books, music and 4,000 films, and we keep doing cultural events. Upstairs in our building, we have a lovely space about 2,500 square feet, like a five-room flat, with AC and wooden floors, which we use as a gallery,” says Kishore, who saved the Kolkata library of the Max Mueller Bhavan from a nationwide shutdown of MMB libraries and moved it to his arts center this year. “When the Italians got in touch, I figured the Via Margutta would come there.”

Further, residents of Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai and Trivandrum will get to see six films of that much-admired actor Vittorio Gassman, no stranger to the mad messiahs who ardently watched masters of Italian cinema amidst power cuts and dust storms in cobwebby film clubs.

Discovering the Italians on home turf promises to be fun. And perhaps they too will make discoveries about us because culture is famously “an instrument for reciprocal comprehension”.