Anne Frank’s voice becomes music

It was the Day of Remembrance that prompted the Teatro Regio to reopen the hall, after months of closure due to technical reasons. On the program “The Diary of Anne Frank”, the first Italian performance of a monodrama, composed in 1972 by the Russian musician Grigorij Frid: a work that has had an extraordinary number of performances over the years. On the stage there is only one character, precisely Anna Franck who, with the voice of soprano Shira Patchornik, sings some pages of her diary on the soundtrack of a chamber orchestra conducted by Giulio Laguzzi. Moving, intense, truthful was the effect of the sixty minutes of the show. The score of Frid, born in Petrograd in 1915 and died in Moscow in 2012, is an iridescent flow of eclectic style: it starts from the “objective” music of Weil and Stravinsky, to fade into the atmospheric evocation of Britten, not without clear reminiscences of German expression. There are brazen marches and dark explosions, vaporous dream evocations and mysterious echoes, fragments of melody, military violence and very poetic thinning. The writing is refined, of great taste, and nourishes Anna’s declamation with a phantasmagoria of effects that create an atmosphere that is both poetic and disturbing, underlined by the sober direction of Anna Maria Bruzzese and enhanced by the splendid figures of “Controluce Teatro d’ombre ”That float distressed and dreamy against the background of the stage. The result was, therefore, an evening perfectly suited to the occasion: that of concentrating the memory on the human drama of the victims, rather than on the horror of the pains suffered, just as Liliana Segre implicitly indicated in the message read at the beginning.