Festival Parma Frontière “Be A Candle In The Darkness”

Parma Frontière Orchestra in historical Teatro Farnese, Parma, Italy, September 27, 2025

The festival, the orchestras, the venue Teatro Farnese

Parma Frontière is a yearly festival spreading over the months September and October founded with the City Hall Parma and organized by Parma Frontière Associazione Cultural under artistic direction of musician/composer Roberto Bonati.

Two orchestras, the Parma Frontière Orchestra (PFO), a 15-piece ensemble, and the Chironomic Orchestra teamed up by local as regional musicians and international guests function as backbone of the festival. The PFO is an ensemble with a largely fixed cast and a few guests. For this year’s production Dutch (bass)clarinetist Fie Schouten was invited. These orchestras present productions of new projects and compositions of Roberto Bonati, which are also documented on greater number of albums through the years (see below).

Fie Schouten

Other concerts you can find HERE: a.o. Gianluigi Trovesi, Barry Guy/Maya Homburger, Arve Henriksen/Harmen Fraanje, Morten Halle, Andrea Grossi Blend 3 with Jim Black, the eminent Madreperla Trio and a new project “Land(e)scapes” by the Chironomic Orchestra. This year also the International Giorgio Gaslini Award ceremony will be part of the festival that is from now on in charge of the award. This year the award will go to excellent Italian saxophonist Gabriele Fava, a name to keep in mind and spend a listening (earlier awardees were the drummers Sun-Mi Hong and Pedro Melo Alves, pianist Kirke Karja and saxophonist Daniele Nasi).

 
Gabriele Fava ©️ Elisa Magnoni

Parma Frontière represents an exceptional festival format by working with these special orchestral sizes and having the compositional work of one of the most sophisticated composers in European jazz (see REVIEW of Duncan Heining in All About Jazz: “Roberto Bonati is one of the most important composers in jazz today. He writes music that matters, and in the Parma Frontiere Orchestra he has the perfect vehicle for his visions of what contemporary jazz composition can be.”) as its guiding thread. This practice is also supported by the collaboration of the Parma conservatory with the conservatories of Vienna, Nuremberg and Oslo. There is a strong Norwegian axis through the years.

Teatro Farnese is a Renaissance theatre built from 1618 on as part of the Palazzo della Pilotta of the Parma and Piacenza Dukal family Farnese. It is an imposing space in the form of an amphitheatre with good acoustics. In the glorious past, the playing field for boat racing could even be submerged. HERE and HERE you can read about the turbulent construction history and ways of its usage through the centuries.

On a site radiating such historical grandeur, a music program on the merciless and radical destruction of the city of Gaza and its complete surrounding with daily mass killing of its inhabitants is an extra speaking sharp contrast.


This year’s opus

This year’s production, “Be A Candle in the Darkness”, was an extended composition of Roberto Bonati provoked by the tragedy of the extremely destructive Gaza-retaliatory strike of the Israeli Defense Forces, which, as a result of the attack of the Hamas guerrilla on Israeli territory on October 7, 2023, has been unfolding in front of our eyes on a daily basis since then as an act of unbridled genocidal violence with unprecedented destructive will and force to destroy. The 1,100 victims of the Hamas attack are offset by well over more than 60,000 dead and a much higher number of physically, mentally and emotionally maimed victims.

Bonati takes this tragedy out of the fray and direct political activism, elevating it to the level of fatal loss of humanity and the fall from the edge of dark abysses and the concomitant loss of fundamental humanitarian values and orientations:

“Faced with the human, political and economic violence with which the annihilation of the Palestinian people is being pursued in the silence of many governments and aware of the tragic history of these lands I wanted and sought a perhaps impossible hope of survival for a forgotten Humanitas and for a humanity that had forgotten itself.”

It is an attempt of sparking a little light in the fallen darkness according to the line of a poem of Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) that lead to the work's title:

"While you think of others, those far away, think of yourself.
And say: I wish I were a candle in the darkness"

What can creating and making music contribute in such a horrendous situation with such massively distorted perceptions and outrageously dehumanizing attitudes?

“There is little we can do as musicians except witness and share a pain, express, through music, beyond any rhetoric, a compassion. For the vocal parts, I chose verses from Terentius, Virgil, and the Orphic Hymns so that these words, which have spanned the centuries and built our civilization, can still enlighten us and show us a path through this dystopian reality of ours.” 

Potential healing paradoxon

The music revealed as an empathetic reflection of mingling waves of frightening, suffocating, shocking, disgusting perceptions, stackings of shocks, pain, rage, sadness, grief, raising of fears and emergence of defense and flashes of encouragement … All that had to find its suiting, adequate sound, its form, its intensity and cadence in co-sounding, confluence, disruption etc.. Not in a simple soothing or  frightening façon but all that fluctuating, shifting inner moods. A destructive reality had to find its constructive expression, constituting a potential healing paradoxon. That process and its musical outcome reveals qualities that need to be awakened, and need to unfold when deeply hostile combatants need or want to find way(s) to cooperate. There are historical examples and role models for this (as South Africa and Ireland) longer process, which is much more than 
‘deal-making’.

It is a credit to Roberto Bonati that he has taken that seriously on the task and together with his musicians gave it form through their special Parma-esque dynamic orchestraliness in a seizing, deep working and moving way. There were catharsis moments but it did not take away or resolve the inner grief and anger that will need a longer and deep work-through and reworking. It is an open wound that continues to be torn open almost unhindered in front of everyone's eyes and sinks into blood.

Political

Roberto Bonati has earlier taken up political topics and war events.

“Si erano vestiti dalia festa” is an Homage to the 1922 Barricades in Parma in resistance against harassing fascists.

Music does not ‘tell’ directly about war sceneries and clashes but in combination with visuals, field recordings and spoken word it can amplify, intensify impressions and evoke higher urgency and concern (see e.g. the discussion HERE concerning Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich).

Text and photo’s © Henning Bolte

   
Angela Malagisi


line-up Parma Frontière Orchestra: 

Roberto Bonati | direzione e composizione
Angela Malagisi | vocal
Riccardo Luppi | flute, sax
Gabriele Fava | sax
Mario Arcari | hobo
Fie Schouten | clarinets
Michael Gassmann | trumpet
Paolo Botti | viola
Oscar De Caro | tuba
Liliana Amadei | violine
Antonio Amadei | violoncello
Luca Perciballi | electric guitar
Andrea Dulbecco | vibraphone
Giancarlo Patris | double bass
Roberto Dani | percussion/drums


     
Antonio Amadei | Roberto Dani

      
Roberto Dani | Luca Perciballi | Andrea Dulbecco



"As you prepare your breakfast, think of others (do not forget the pigeon's food).
As you conduct your wars, think of others (do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others (those who are nursed by clouds).
As you return home, to your home, think of others (do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others (those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others (those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself (say: "If only I were a candle in the dark”)."

Mahmoud Darwish

Selective discography

Roberto Bonati Parma Frontière Orchestra - La fòla de l’osa. Overtime
Parma Frontiere PF-CD013

Roberto Bonati Chironomic Orchestra - The Gesture of Sound, The Gesture of Colour
Parma Frontiere PF-CD014

Roberto Bonati Parma Frontière Orchestra - Si erano vestiti dalia festa
Parma Frontiere PF-CD015

Roberto Bonati Madreperla Trio - Parfois la nuit
Parma Frontiere PF-CD016

Roberto Bonati Chironomic Orchestra - Il suono improvviso
Parma Frontiere PF-DVD02

Roberto Bonati Chironomic Orchestra - Whirling Leaves
Parma Frontiere PF-CD008

Roberto Bonati/Tor Yttredal - Some Red, Some Yellow
Parma Frontiere PF-CD010

https://robertobonati.bandcamp.com/