Excerpts from published reviews of the opera

“Coccioli succeeding even in surprising us, thanks particularly to a skilful exploitation of electronic techniques. …Themes a little ambitious certainly, in the confines of a lyrical work, but which Coccioli seizes the essence of, with a certain poetry and beautiful suggestive moments.”
Nicola Gandolfi, Opera International, June 1998

“If there is one strength in particular that Magma can claim, it is the (one might almost say ‘Berianesque’) capacity of the composer to establish his own style, whatever the historical and ‘geographic’ diversity of the sonic means at his disposal. And a highly theatrical characteristic of this style derives from the dramatic skills of the score, which never allows the tension to lapse.”
Enrico Girardi, L’Opera, May 1998

“It is a music rich with its own strong, communicative immediacy, combined with a search seemingly for the roots of an original, primordial vocabulary. It refers to diverse experiences and languages, bearing in mind perhaps above all the lessons of Berio, but in an autonomous fashion, with a play of interactions where the tension never dips (for instance, in the highly effective ending)”
Paolo Petazzi, L’Unita’, 23 March 1998

“Last Friday, with astonishing simultaneity, two in different ways memorable premieres: at Genoa Venus and Adonis, by Hans Werner Henze, and at Lugo di Romagna by contrast the first opera of a ‘de luxe’ debutant, Lamberto Coccioli, pupil of Luciano Berio and Azio Corghi… An archetypal trajectory, oneiric, perhaps a nightmare that Coccioli, thanks also to Sebastian Schloessingk’s edged and aphoristic text, reads with wide open eyes, so multiplying vertiginously the languages and ‘materials’ of the performance: song, speech, acoustic sound, artificial sound, film, stage design, all rigorously deprived of their centre, their functionality. But loosened into each other by the most limpid and organised discipline of metamorphosis.”
Guido Barbieri, Il Gazzettino di Venezia

“Magma, or The See-Through Wilderness, a new opera by the young composer Lamberto Coccioli, presents a music of such lambent sensuality and richly dramatic colour that it cannot but convince even those weaned on an exclusive diet of bel canto…
But it is Coccioli’s music, from the shimmering soundscape of the Introduzione to the pounding heartbeat of the Finale, that insists that this work find a place in the international repertoire, redefining ‘Italian opera’.”
Adrian Dannatt, The Independent, 27 March 1998

Translated from Italian and French by Sebastian Schloessingk