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.