Animals' Carnival

Animals' carnival and other love beasts

Music by Camille Saint-Saens and songs by Vinicio Capossela

with 

Vinicio Capossela and his ensemble, Amadei Trio and the soloists of Vianiner Philarmoniker

The concert features the performance of «Animals' Carnival», composed by Camille Saint-Saens in 1886 and a series of songs by Vinicio Capossela, all tied together in a tale that makes us wander between stories of famous animals, symbolism and bestiaries.

Bestiaries... Animals, masks of enygma, masks able to make us enter the sacred sphere, mysterious deities with which we share the Creation. In Medieval bestiaries they were studied not in the scientific or zoological sense, but with the aim of getting out of the real and entering the true.

Animals' natures are representative of human nature, of love and sin's nature. But man's lordship transformed our relationship with animals, little by little, into indifference, blindness, unawareness. Animals got out of our lives and got into cartoons or documentaries, or on the table, where the most common relationship that we live with them happens: eating them. 

Giving up on animals is getting rid of an access to nature that, as Psarantonis says, is God. So animals are God's demonstration, the demonstration of another language spoken on Earth. 

When we are in love, we are dominated by our most instinctive part. We can study, as Richard de Fournival did, the behaviours and natures that arise with love feelings, comparing them to animals' behaviours, as they were known in the Middle Ages. Love bestiary is the zoo that we have in ourselves, when passion opens the cages.

Vinicio Capossela