Space,Place, and Music

After taking some time to process a very rich second summer at the Anghiari Music Festival, I want to share some of the unique expereiences created by the performance of intricately textured music in historically textured places. My thoughts have been influenced by those of Professor Roland Guenther, an early planner and proponent of the preservation of cultural landscapes, a scholar in Urban Studies, and an honorary citizen of Anghiari.

The festival runs for a full week in July, and the participants, The Southbank Sinfonia of London, the choral group Vox Musica, and this summer the Dutch National Opera, perform up to three concerts a day. From that broad range of wonderful concerts, two examples can give a sense of the interaction between the music and the venue.

One evening we drove a short distance out of Anghiari to Santa Maria alla Sovara, a Renaissance church damaged in the recent earthquake and reopened just this year. The program included Vivaldi's Magnificat and Haendel's Dixit Dominus. The spaces of the church interacted with the voices and instruments in a powerful symbiosis, notes soaring up into the vaulted ceiling, then sustaining and fading in a completely organic movement. And the church enclosed us in a specific place, stirring currents of meaning atround the history of the building and the music it facilitated.

On the final morning of the festival, we gathered in the restored medieval Badia just up from our apartment for a virtuoso performance of Schubert's quintet, the longest chamber work in the repertoire. The small church embraced us along with the musicians in an intimate environment perfectly matched to the dialogue offered by the players. Again, the space controlled the sound, producing a private experience, and again, the place created historical associations, linking the sacred and the secular.

The Anghiari Festival reminds us of that deep connection among space, place, and music, urging us out of sterile concert halls and into the architecture all around us, wherever we live. Of course, the musicians must exercise care in choosing venues and works, but when space, place and music converge, they yield an incomparable engagement of all the senses.

Last Days

We had much debate about where to go after (sigh) leaving Anghiari. Pompeii and Ercolano called, but we had misgivings about the amount of time we had available after lingering on in Anghiari to hear the Mozart opera and a final chamber music performance on Sunday afternoon. Moreover, Tom's wonderful doctor in San Sepulcro wanted to see him again on Monday morning to give him another treatment. Eventually, we also agreed that it was too hot to turn south.

Therefore, after the last treatment in San Sepulcro, we set our sights on Mantua, where we drove through the still pastoral setting of Virgil's birthplace just outside the city, and enjoyed a rich day taking in the artistic wonders of the court palaces of the Gonzagas. Our first objective was to see Mantegna's paintings in the Bridal Chamber. A plus was the discovery that Mantua is the place where Giulio Romano flourished. As the only artist specifically mentioned by Shakespeare, he captured Tom's interest. We admired his beautiful home and some of his other architectural creations. However, his great glory was as a master of fresco. The student of Rafael, he had a great realistic technique, but he lacked any sense of restraint. Thus, his great works are the over-the-top frescoes of the story of Troy, the gods celebrating the wedding of Cupid and Psyche presided over by a gigantic Polyphemus, and the notorious Hall of the Giants. Here, he portrays the gods fleeing in terror from the giants as massive earthquakes crush the mammoth figures of the primordial sons of Gaia. Nothing subtle about Giulio Romano!
After an exhausting day of hoofing about Mantua, we chose a more conservative route for the last day, heading straight for Florence. Our first objective was to turn in the car, and then to head for the Brancacci Chapel to see the frescoes of Masaccio, Filippino Lippi and others. That was all we aimed to do on that day. Walking back across the Arno, we spent an hour in Santa Maria Novella, admiring the frescoes there. Then we went to the Cathedral Square for drinks in an exorbitantly expensive cafe. A final delicious Tuscan dinner concluded our stay in Italy and it was early to bed and early to rise for our trip home.