Cello Voice Percussion
The only permanent ensemble of its kind in Italy, DUOroboros is a chamber duo composed by Dagmar Bathmann at the cello and voice and Omar Cecchi at the percussion instruments.
The duo is founded in 2016 on the occasion of the two musician’s collaboration with the theater company Compagnia Lombardi-Tiezzi at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. Since then, the duo continues to perform with the Compagnia Lombardi-Tiezzi at some of the most important italian theaters and radio stations, like RAI Radio 3, Teatro India (Rome), Villa Torlonia (Rome), Piccolo Teatro (Milan) and others.
The chamber music activity begins within the context of “Pistoia, Italian capital of Culture 2017”. Later, the duo performs at the Fondazione Luigi Tronci (Pistoia), the Auditorium di Santo Stefano al Ponte Vecchio (Florence), the Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte di Montepulciano, the international festival Musica Prospettiva 2019-2020.
In 2017 the two musicians obtain the artist residency “Camere contemporanee” of the Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte di Montepulciano, a scholarship dedicated to the contemporary repertoire. Thanks to this opportunity, follow perfomances at the Teatro dell’Opera in Florence, the Italian Cultural Institute in Brussels, the Fondazione Ivan Bruschi (Arezzo) and others.
The specificity of the duo lies in the combination of cello and percussion, whose encounter represents the interaction of two fundamental elements of music: rhythm and melody.
However, the very unique resource of the duo is the use of the mezzo-soprano voice of the cellist, which in some pieces sings and plays simultaneously.
It is thus possible to develop a three-part dialogue between the melody of the voice, the bass line of the cello and the percussion instruments, which appear in roles between harmony and counterpoint.
Through the commission and performance of new works, the DUOroboros creates and promotes pathways of artistic research. Some of the composers that wrote new music specifically for the DUOroboros are: Matteo Belli, Satoru Ikeda, Riccardo Perugini, Valerio Rossi, Giovanni Vannoni, Edgar Warren Williams.
Beyond their dedication to contemporary works originally written for the two instruments and voice, the duo strives to explore the different possibilities offered by the unusual formation through the reelaboration and reinterpretation of pieces from the Classical and Popular repertoire.
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