Silvia Colasanti’s Requiem for soloists, choir and orchestra is dedicated to the victims of the 2016 earthquake in central Italy. Latin Requiem Mass texts are complemented by new texts, specially written by the poet Mariangela Gualtieri. The work is a chant of farewell to the dead, to their small and large shadows, the rejection of a mournful idea of death and of an angry, judging, authoritarian and punitive God. But it is also a song of hope and thanksgiving.

Reflecting the composer’s affinity for stage works, the Requiem has an oratorio structure with various characters: a reciting voice impersonates 'the doubter', the most unorthodox element with regard to historical and common rhetoric; a 'chorus of the undoubting' represents the archetypal religious approach; a solo female voice interprets the 'heart burnt to ashes', an embodiment of suffering; and there is a solo bandoneon to personify 'a desire of Rebirth', which is a request for the redemption from our human insignificance and a song of thanksgiving to the earth and the sky, a combination of the secular rite of music and poetry with the traits of compassion, ardour and sweetness.