This year’s traditional Christmas Concert at Miradolo Castle, now in its fifteenth season, delightfully weaves into and brings to a close the Giorgio Griffa exhibition A Line, Montale, and Something Else.
On Wednesday, December 25th (9:30 p.m.) and Thursday, December 26th (6:30 p.m.), the castle’s thirty-six-meter-long neogothic greenhouse will be transformed into a boundless soundscape reverberating with the eighteen canvases making up Giorgio Griffa’s Golden Ratio 980. Where music and painting will playfully connect and interconnect, opening up glimpses into that hidden world so dear to Joyce, and which it is the age-old task of the arts to explore.
Taking inspiration from the Venetian polychoral style of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the collective Avant-dernière pensée will be crafting a uniquely immersive experience, in which two string quartets engage in a playful game of echoes and spatial contrasts from the two ends of the greenhouse, prompting us to reflect on “contemporaneity.” Using an innovative sound recording and playback system, a live violin and cello dialogue with a “virtual” violin and viola, giving rise to a performance revolving around an audience engaged in an active listening experience.
Featuring pieces by Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, Steve Reich and John Cage, including the compositions chosen for the different sections of the exhibition, the concert will take the audience on a musical journey through sound geometries and silences, exploring the visionary heights reached by twentieth-century music.
The two performances will be introduced, one hour before each concert, by a listening guide prepared by Roberto Galimberti, music director and mind behind the project.