"Nanas para una ciudad," the new Community Opera project of the L'Albero Theater Company, is one of 10 cultural projects selected as part of the process of preparing the Spanish city of Burgos for candidacy as European Capital of Culture 2031.

The goal of the project is the writing of a collective intergenerational contemporary composition, through the methodology of co-creation, from the traditional music of lullabies heritage of the adult and child citizens of the cities of Burgos and Matera. The idea starts from the consideration of lullaby music as the intimate heritage of communities: an intergenerational music par excellence, because there is always an adult who sings it to a little one.

The project sees the collaboration of the "Ars-Cantus" Choir of the Universidad de Burgos and the "Universa Musica" Choir of the University of Basilicata and will be concluded by a performance of choral music by the citizens of Burgos and Matera: a lullaby for the city to be performed in a night concert in Burgos in May 2024.

Last Dec. 4, the co-creation process of "Nanas para una ciudad" began in Matera, with the involvement of male and female students of the "Pascoli" Comprehensive Institute and participants in the History of Music workshop of the Faculty of Primary Education of the University of Basilicata. The work of composing and writing music and text for a new lullaby started on the one hand from listening to Bach and lullabies of Western cultured music, and on the other hand from the recovery of participants' memories.

Vania Cauzillo, co-artistic director of L'Albero, briefly recounts the project, "In 2019 with the Silent City project (one of the best projects of Matera 2019, Editor's note) we worked with the local community of Matera through the co-creation method, creating a fully collaborative opera with children and adults. For the Burgos Capital of Culture we thought of something similar, but dealing with the tradition and heritage that are present in citizens of different ages, that of lullabies. The idea is to write with the citizens of Matera and Burgos a lullaby for the city, so that citizens can leave home and help the city fall asleep with a meaning that is European and that comes from the personal history of each of the people who will participate."

 Theater company L'Albero is a company recognized by the Ministry of Culture - General Directorate of Performing Arts in the field of promoting music for social cohesion and inclusion and by the Basilicata Region in the field of promoting and developing live performance. Its artistic directors are Vania Cauzillo and Alessandra Maltempo. The Community Opera method was created with the aim of bringing opera to territorial contexts and communities otherwise never reached by this artistic form, as a legacy of "Silent City," the opera co-created with the citizens of Matera within the 2019 European Capital of Culture program.

In the "Nanas para una ciudad" project, L'Albero has the role of artistic direction and coordination, recruitment of artists, management and organization of the co-creation workshops and direction of the final performance. In addition, the project benefits from the artistic and research work of playwright Andrea Ciommiento, composer Matteo Manzitti, musicologist Prof. Dinko Fabris, and director and choir teacher Francisco Javier Centeno Martín.