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.

Anghiari Festival

Today is a gloriously cool and sunny day in Anghiari, but it is, perforce, a day of rest, in part because a recurrent, stabbing pain in my left knee has left me immobilized for now (and quite possibly for the rest of our trip). So it is a good time to catch up on all the delightful places we've been and concerts we've heard during the past week or so.

We are right now the midst of the Anghiari Festival, a week of (mostly) glorious live classical music presented by the Southbank Sinfonia from London, a company of talented young musicians, mostly from England, but with a sprinkling of other European countries as well, fresh out of conservatory, who are touring with a superb professional chamber chorus called Vox Musica and a group of superb aspiring operatic singers from the Dutch Nation,al Academy of Opera. Starting last Saturday (July 17) with a splendid performance of Haydn's Cello Concerto and Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto on the beautiful Piazza del Popolo, we then attended on Sunday morning a choral mass at the nearby Chiesa della Propositura, which featured the marvelous Vox Musica, whose voices filled the acoustically resonant, barrel-vaulted sanctuary.

Then Monday night (July 19) we drove out of town a bit to the impressive Pieve di Santa Maria della Sovara, where the orchestra and chorus performed a flawless and memorable set of baroque masterpieces--Vivaldi's Magnificat and a rich and glorious Vivaldi concerto for many instruments (trading riffs back and forth between the tutti parts for mostly string orchestra and a solo ensemble of winds). These were interspersed first with a luminous Corelli Concerto Grosso, and then, for the finale, Handel's seldom-performed oratorio Dixit Dominus. This was, by far, the most exquisitely performed and deeply satisfying concert we have seen here, for the venue--the ancient stone-columned parish church dating from the 7th or 8th Century but renovated in the 15th Cenury--was ideally matched to the music, and the bright-eyed, enthusiastic young performers were at the top of their game.

Tuesday evening, in the nearby Piazza Mameli, we were treated to a selection of operatic arias and duets by highly gifted young sopranos and mezzos from the Dutch Academy of Opera, who brought a wonderfully dramatic range of expression--from tragic to angry to coquettish--to their flawless performances of Dvorak's Hymn to the Moon from Rusalka, the Flower Duet from Lakme, Rosina's aria from the Barber of Seville, a sprightly aria from Handel's Alcinda, and a tragic aria from La Traviata. (I am indebted to Ann for remembering these titles--I am not, myself, all that well acquainted with the operatic literature).

Wednesday evening started with a lovely chamber concert, again in Piazza Mameli, but the evening concert, in the rural Cloister Church of Carmine, was a bit of a let-down, since it featured a numbingly repetitive modern piece by Russian emigre composer Vladimir Martynov, and the acoustics were quite muddy. But things picked up again quickly on Thursday, when we were treated to a finely wrought modern violin concerto by Polish-Mexican composer Ryszard Siwy, played with serene concentration and brilliant expressiveness by his gorgeous and talented daughter Lucia. This, for me, was the apex of the week, both musically and emotionally, for after Lucia's impeccable performance, her father joined her for the standing ovation. It is rare indeed that one can witness a performance where both father and daughter have equal reason to be immensely proud of each other!

On Friday afternoon, we walked down to the foot of the hill to St. Stefano, an ancient Byzantine chapel, shaped in a Platonic circle and square, to hear yet another exquisite chamber performance of a piece for winds by Samuel Barber and Mozart's clarinet quintet. Then that night there was another orchestral concert on the outskirts of town, in the courtyard of the Castello di Sorci, where once again, one of the young violinists named Olga Muszynska, a demure young woman, ably performed a Panufnik violin concerto. The concert ended with Beethoven's second symphony, but by this time, the players were visibly exhausted--and Beethoven has no mercy on musicians!--so the performance was quite uneven.

On Saturday night, we attended a thrilling performance of Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito in the Piazza di Popoli, featuring superb singers and performers from the Dutch National Opera, who used the entire square--not just the stage--in their blocking, and brought vividly to life the schemes and counter-schemes of the characters, all backed by Mozart's magnificent score.

The festival closed on Sunday, first with a superb performance of Schubert's dramatic and challenging String Quintet in the Chiesa della Badia, and then with a concert featuring a wind octet by Prokofiev. There were also a series of operatic arias on the square by the men (as opposed to the earlier recital by the women) of the Dutch National Opera, and a rather schmaltzy vocal quartet (though beautifully performed) called "Close of Day" but Sir Arthur Sullivan. The concert concluded with two delicious short pieces for string quartet by Shostakovich.

This festival, right in Anghiari where we were staying, greatly enriched what was already a glorious vacation.

Happy Birthday, Laura!

I'm just posting greetings and congratulations to Laura and Margo as the rest of my family celebrates the birthday and graduation in Washington,D.C. I know I told you not to have any fun without me,but ignore those sour grapes and live to the hilt.

Amee

Confusion among the flowers

The beautiful Tuscan landscape of gold, deep green and rusty red is dotted here and there with brilliant carpets of yellow green--fields of sunflowers. Whereas these flowers once turned in unison to follow the sun, so that the entire field changed color in the course of the day as the yellow petals turned toward or away from the viewer, today they are tilted every which way in confusion. Agrobusiness has bred the flower heads to produce more seed by taking out the gene that allows them to tilt toward the sun as the day progresses. Someone decided that used up too much energy and wasn't good for profits. Juliet remarked that she believes the flowers still know where the sun is, and try to turn their faces toward it, but they now lack the strength to do it. So now they stand in confusion across the landscape, drooping their heavy heads in all directions.

I have wild sunflowers in my garden back in Hampton. Perhaps one day I will bring the seeds and send them out across Italy to breed rebellion in the sunflower realm and free the next generation of these flowers from their bondage. Perhaps someday again we will see the stately dance of these majestic flowers as they follow their king in his daily progress across the blue Tuscan sky.

Hilltop Villages

One of the salient characteristics of this sun-drenched, Arcadian landscape of Tuscany and Umbria is that many of the most prominent, picturesque, and historically and artistically endowed towns and villages are built on hilltops, surrounded by high stone walls. This is partly because Italy, until the 19th Century, was a tapestry of autonomous city-states, principalities, and republics, often at war with one another, and allied with various contending power centers on or off the peninsula--Florence, Milan, Venice, the Papacy, the Holy Roman Empire, France, Spain, and so on--so the need for defense against invasion was never far from their minds.

Not only do we live in just such a fortified, hilltop village, site of a famous and decisive battle between the allies of Milan and Florence, but over the past few days, we have visited several others. These include Monte Santa Maria Tiberino, a gorgeous high hilltop village in Umbria, visible on the horizon from our window, where we drove with the Quickes along a narrow, twisting, switchback road last Friday night for a concert in the Piazza featuring a theme and variations for oboe and orchestra by Johann Nepamuk Hummel, a dazzling flute concerto by Jacques Ibert, and Mozart's Jupiter Symphony.

Then, yesterday, we drove down to Montepulciano, another wonderful hilltop town in Umbria, where we visited an exquisite exhibition of privately owned Italian pre-impressionist paintings, a group called the Macchiaoli, whose emphasis on the play of light and shadow in Italian rural landscapes prefigured the techniques later taken up by Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh. We ended up at still another nearby hilltop village, Pienza, where the local cathedral was built right over the edge of a precipice, so that the area around the altar was visibly subsiding. Once again, the views we had, both within and around these towns, are better shown than described:

This is the Temple of San Biaggio, a classic Renaissance design, just down the hill from Montepulciano.

Here is Montepulciano as we approach it from below.

Chi ha l'ag'io ha la gioia

As we drove from Padova to Anghiari, we played tag with a truck bearing this logo on the side, "Whoever has garlic, has joy", with the Italian word for garlic, aglio,written in a slang form, so gah-lic might be a better translation. Joy may not combine too smoothly with garlic in English, but in Italian all those letters blend beautifully. The flow of vowels, with just a few consonants like rocks in a stream that create distinct paths, aptly figures the wonders of Italian cooking. The vowels, a steady supply of very fresh fruits, vegetables, and olive oil, and the consonants one clean breast of chicken, a flaky bit of fish, a fine wedge of Pecorino cheese.

We sat for a while in the Piazza dei Signori in Verona, and Ann photographed a blue container filled with apricots and tiny red tomatoes, a picture that captures one moment in that simple, refreshing river of food.