jorge a. bosso
musician, composer, cellist
works_vocal_
Requiem
for male choir, soprano and cello
First Performance: June 9th 2004, Sakharov International Art Festival, Kremlin Hall, Nizhny Novgorod.
Olga Kokhorina, soprano
Jorge A. Bosso, cello
Chamber Choir of Nizhny Novgorod
Boris Mokeev, conductor
Duration: 55’
The compromise of translating into sounds the blessed word, in our time, I think it is for every composer and artist a task that has as an initial point, or a limit situation or a relationship of cause-effect for what it could not be possible to conceive any other way of expression different from the chosen one. Determinism? Perhaps, but In my case, the condition in which I was, after the loss of my mother, drove me to undertake the composition of a Requiem. I did not choose to do it.
A mass, for its own definition, goes beyond the concept that a concert implies. It is a pray. It is a gathering of the human being in loneliness with the Divine, with the Sublime in a research to reach a superior state of existence from the individual, through the collective, that it is in itself the last aim of every artistic creation.
On the other hand, only for the premiere, I decided to celebrate the persona of Giordano Bruno, a paradigm of thought, conscience and the reflection of a man who sought to display intellectual religiousness, naturalistic, free from dogma and axiomatic principles. Victim of intolerance and deprived of Man’s right to believe what he thinks, as opposed to having to think what others want him to believe.
Passages from the lengthy trial, overseen by the Cardinal Bellarmino, have been read by Alexander Poznansky.
The course of medieval thought, radically theocentric, accepted only the concept that Man and the World were expressions of and meanings for the divine Greatness. Despite that, during this historic period, and even prior beginning with the volunteerism and nominalism of Guglielmo d’Occam, there began a departure from that hypothetical center, a withdrawal from God and a return to that which remains for a human being once the divine Entity has shown itself to be inaccessible to Reason: the World and Himself.
This in fact does not imply a denial of God, but it was no longer possible to conceive of Him as one’s support or sustenance, rather as a horizon; the effect was that Man could no longer base all thought beginning from the Divinity, but rather from Himself.
Requiem to the Dominican monk who embraced since adolescence a religion in which he had believed, in which he felt he had found certainties, but which – upon further reflection – created in him a basic doubt which was also a consequence of the fundamental revelations of Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo, the founding fathers of the “new science” of Nature.
Giordano Bruno had the courage to spread their ideas and “support the existence of multiple worlds and their eternity”, this then being the motive constituting the fifth accusation during his trial.
Peace and repose to the one who chose, the one who built, out of deep need, his doctrine, his system in order to survive and oppose immense and profound human miseries, jeopardizing his own life, an alternative existence.
Jorge A. Bosso
