Philippe Jordan, Music Director of the Paris Opera since 2009, has
just left his post after guiding the institution's Orchestra and Chorus to
musical summits and maintaining them there for twelve years. A highly fruitful
collaboration, characterized by musical and human exchanges, as testified by
musicians and chorus members.
https://www.operadeparis.fr/en/magazine/sharing-music
The new opera, which anchored the Aix-en-Provence Festival, is a monumental cry against gun violence.
By Alex Ross
Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Innocence,” which had its première at the Aix-en-Provence Festival on July 3rd, contains one of the most unnerving scenes I’ve witnessed at a theatre. About forty minutes into the piece, in a scene marked “IT,” the chorus chants the phrase “When it happened” in staggered rhythm, with low piano and double-basses punching up each syllable. A frame drum raps out sixteenth notes in rapid-fire bursts, and two trumpets let loose a series of “rips”—quick, shrieking upward glissandos. Then the orchestral mayhem cuts off abruptly; sopranos oscillate queasily between the notes A-flat and G; and the brutal rhythm resumes in the percussion. The terror is made explicit onstage, as a high-school student stumbles through a door, his arms covered in blood. A shooter, a fellow-student, is laying siege to a Finnish international school. Opera, which has been making art from death for more than four centuries, is recording a new kind of horror.
The shock of the moment is redoubled by the fact that the audience
is only just discovering what the opera is really about. At the beginning, a strangely cheerless wedding reception is in progress,
at a restaurant in Finland. The groom’s brother was involved in an unnamed
tragedy ten years in the past; the bride, an immigrant from Romania, knows
nothing of that history. A waitress is sickened upon learning which family has
hired her for a wedding: her daughter died in the tragedy in question. Evasive
locutions of politeness and shame conceal the specifics of what happened until
performers begin enacting the memories of the survivors.
The libretto is by the Finnish-Estonian
novelist Sofi Oksanen, who knows how to play on our expectations and then
short-circuit them. The title is ironic: the characters refuse to arrange themselves
into a simplistic array of heroes and villains. The killer is never heard from,
though there are glimpses of him as a bullied kid. The aftermath is chaotic:
media sensationalism and political doublespeak have done their work. The groom
confesses that he rejoices at the news of new shootings, because they confirm
that “monsters are bred in other families, too.” A teacher subjects her
students’ papers to paranoid analysis, searching for signs of mental
instability: “I reported any weird syntax in their essays, any change in their
handwriting, until I understood I wasn’t fit for teaching anymore.”
The psychological-thriller components of “Innocence” mark a change
for Saariaho, who rose to fame by employing modernist and avant-garde
techniques to summon otherworldly, dreamlike spheres. Her best-known score is
the opera “L’Amour de Loin,” which premièred in Salzburg in 2000 and arrived at
the Met in 2016; it gorgeously evokes the rarefied longings of the
twelfth-century troubadour Jaufré Rudel. Saariaho’s second opera, “Adriana Mater”
(2006), made a turn toward contemporary reality, telling of a woman raped in
time of war, but its approach was more meditative and abstract. “Innocence,”
which Saariaho completed in 2018, has a seething rawness. It’s as if the
turmoil of recent years had prompted her to abandon aesthetic distance and
enter the melee of the real.
Saariaho has said in an interview that she
modelled “Innocence” on two great Expressionist shockers of the early twentieth
century, “Elektra” and “Wozzeck.” Like those operas, “Innocence” lasts less
than two hours, its five acts and twenty-five scenes unfolding without
interruption. The orchestral prologue introduces familiar elements of
Saariaho’s sound world: solo woodwind and brass lines that twirl about or trill
in place; eerie clockwork ostinatos on celesta and harp; grandly groaning
textures for full ensemble. Sharper-edged, more propulsive patterns soon break
in, but they seldom establish a steady forward motion. The atmosphere is at once
sensual and unsettled—dread in vivid colors.
Generational and demographic divides in the
opera’s community are evident in a controlled squabble of vocal styles. The
members of the wedding party—labelled Bride, Groom, Mother-in-Law,
Father-in-Law, Priest, and Waitress—are conventional singing parts. Five
survivors of the shooting are portrayed by actors or singing actors, who speak,
variously, in Swedish, French, Spanish, German, and Greek. An English teacher
chants her lines in Sprechstimme—the half-spoken, half-sung manner associated
with Schoenberg’s vocal works. Markéta, the shooting victim mourned by her
waitress mother, makes ghostly visitations, her folkish, singsong melodies
slicing through the prevailing density of Saariaho’s harmonic textures.
The début production in Aix, directed by Simon Stone, was
hypernaturalist in style, pitting the ordinary against the unthinkable. The set
designer Chloe Lamford, in collaboration with the lighting designer James
Farncombe, assembled a handsomely drab array of dining rooms, kitchens,
classrooms, bathrooms, and stairwells. The year could have been any since 1950,
but Mel Page’s costumes narrowed the time frame to the early two-thousands. The
entire set rested on a turntable in constant motion; in the later stages of the
opera, as trauma resurfaced, the school spaces replaced the wedding venue, with
splashes of blood appearing on smudged white walls. (Nimble stagehands pulled
off rapid set changes.) The cinematic fluidity of the spectacle proved just as
effective on a video stream, which I watched a week after the première.
At the head of the cast was the Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, who embodied the part of the Waitress with unremitting expressive force. Sandrine Piau and Lilian Farahani gave nuanced portraits of the Mother-in-Law and the Bride; Tuomas Pursio and Markus Nykänen occasionally struggled with the acting demands of, respectively, the Father-in-Law and the Groom. Lucy Shelton was wrenching as the Teacher, who conveys the opera’s battered moral core. Among the actor-singers, Vilma Jää exuded an almost demonic purity as Markéta, and Julie Hega made a mesmerizing, husky-voiced enigma of the student Iris, who unexpectedly dominates the final scenes. Susanna Mälkki, conducting the London Symphony and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, brought to bear her customary precision and authority.
“Innocence” will travel widely: both the Met
and the San Francisco Opera are set to present the work in future seasons. I wonder how
American audiences will cope with its unsparing approach to a subject that, for
several decades, has been locked in accelerating cycles of national insanity.
No false tone of healing or hope is sounded at the end; instead, the circles of
complicity keep widening. What rescues the opera from utter bleakness is the
inherent beauty of Saariaho’s writing. In the concluding bars, a darkly glowing
harmony emerges, somewhere in the vicinity of B major, though a dissonant C in
the double-basses prevents full resolution. Ominously or not, it is the same note on which the opera begins.
An easing of pandemic restrictions allowed Aix
to muster a full schedule this summer, with eight operatic productions. Aside
from “Innocence,” the most elaborate offering was “Tristan und Isolde,” with
Simon Rattle conducting the London Symphony. Stone was again the director, and,
as is his habit, he brought with him marvellously detailed realist sets: the
first act takes place in a deluxe high-rise Paris apartment, the second in an
architect’s office, the third in the Métro. The concept is, however, a tired
one: Isolde as an haute-bourgeoise who escapes an unhappy marriage by
daydreaming about her life in mythic terms. For the most part, the conceit
fails to cohere with Wagner’s drama, though the subway sequences attain a
surreal poetry. The leads, Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton, were the same as
when Rattle conducted “Tristan” at the Met, in 2016. On the second night of the
run, Stemme fell short of her usual standard, but Skelton was in total command,
singing with superhuman intensity through the tenor slaughterhouse of Act III.
On another night, I took a bus to Arles for
the première of Samir Odeh-Tamimi’s music-theatre piece “L’Apocalypse Arabe,”
based on a poetic cycle by the Lebanese American author and artist Etel Adnan.
The performance took place in the Grande Halle of the Luma Arles arts complex,
in the asymmetrical shadow of Frank Gehry’s newly inaugurated Luma tower. Adnan’s
text conjures up the long nightmare of the Lebanese Civil War; Odeh-Tamimi, an
Israeli-Palestinian composer who has long resided in Germany, responds with a
molten score, mixing jagged instrumental textures with rumbling electronica.
The poems are variously sung and recited by a five-member female chorus and by
a male observer known as the Witness. The staging, by Pierre Audi, Aix’s
general director, dwelled on tableaux of figures silhouetted against a desert
sun. After an arresting start, the work failed to take flight as drama, its
imagery oblique and repetitive. Still, the baritone Thomas Oliemans thrashed
about compellingly in the lead role, and Ilan Volkov elicited potent playing
from the Ensemble Modern.
A few hours before seeing “Innocence,” I
attended a theatricalized Baroque program titled “Combattimento: The Black Swan
Theory.” The staging concept, by Silvia Costa, was largely unintelligible, but
the music-making was so superb that the random appearance of cribs and mushroom
clouds could be safely ignored. The Ensemble Correspondances, under the
direction of Sébastien Daucé, led a sumptuous grand tour of seventeenth-century
Italian vocalism, placing Monteverdi’s madrigal-cantata “Combattimento di Tancredi
e Clorinda” alongside excerpts from operas and oratorios by Francesco Cavalli,
Luigi Rossi, and Giacomo Carissimi. Amid a formidable lineup of younger
singers, the mezzo-soprano Lucile Richardot stood out for her lustrous
rendition of “Alle ruine del mio regno,” Hecuba’s apocalyptic aria from
Cavalli’s “Didone.” In the wake of Saariaho’s monumental cry against violence,
I thought back to the deposed Queen of Troy and her search for a “way to
lament, beyond tears.” That way is music, then as now.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-sublime-terror-of-kaija-saariahos-innocence
Beauty remains an uncomfortable territory for many contemporary artists, which makes the boldness of Sarah Ann Weber’s aesthetics all the more compelling.
by Daniel Gerwin
Sarah Ann Weber, "A dreamful ease (2021), oil and colored pencil on panel, 72 x 96 inches (all images courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, photos by Matthew Kroening)
LOS ANGELES — I was recently on the East Coast for the first time in years, and I was stunned by the emerald landscape. Everywhere I looked, verdant trees towered, the likes of which simply do not exist where I live in Southern California. What Los Angeles has is the exoticism of desert plants, which defy imagination with their varied hues and surprising adaptations. Strong Blossoming Thing Forever, Sarah Ann Weber’s current exhibition at Anat Ebgi in Culver City, is a profusion of flora that evokes a coral reef on land, conjured in a color palette rich and tender, never blasting out its notes. The show includes works in paint and colored pencil, on either panel or paper. Female figures appear among the vegetation, featureless nudes whose empty forms are either blank or filled with leaves, vines, and flowers.
Weber’s floral landscape work emerged for the first time in 2017,
at the now-closed Club Pro. At the time I was arrested by the energy in her
packed, jungle-like overgrowths, more phantasmagoric than real. While you will
not find any of Weber’s flowers in a field guide, she tells me they are
inspired by frequent hikes around Los Angeles. Growing up in Chicago, she
developed a love for the landscape by visiting the Fullersburg Woods with her
family, where they would ride bicycles or hike in the summer and cross-country
ski in the winter. The turning point was a trip to France that
Weber took in 2016, where she did a lot of plein air sketching in parks. After
returning to California, she brought those drawings to the studio and worked
them over in color pencil, arriving at the visual language she continues to
explore today.
Weber deftly uses her hallucinatory plant forms to orchestrate scintillating color relationships. In “A dreamful ease” (all works 2021), radiating gray vines descend from the central top border, shifting to a subtle blue at their edges, glowing against the sunset hues of the oil paint wash underneath. On the right side of this composition, a large bush formed by purple brushstrokes is festooned with lemon-yellow flowers, green leaves, pale blue water droplets, and pink and red dotted flower or leaf shapes. She fills her pictures with these fantasies, building up a rambunctious and captivating landscape.
Weber’s art has a confectionary quality, which turns out to have a delightful backstory. Her parents own a bakery in Chicago, a family business started by her grandfather in 1930 (her parents met at the bakery, in fact). Weber’s earliest aesthetic experiences are rooted in cake decorating, with its bright palette, rainbow spray, and sugar flowers. The first time I visited her studio, some five years ago, she was making work in fondant on glass, a literal response to her youth at the bakery. “Petals from blown roses” showcases her penchant for abundant profusions of flowers, in this case divided roughly into quadrants by hue: red and pink in the upper right, light and dark purples in the upper left, a range of blues in the bottom left, and greens dominating the bottom right.
Given her liberal use of pastels and floral imagery, it’s possible to imagine Weber’s work being dismissed as saccharine, but I suspect that what such a critique really means is too feminine, in the stereotypical sense of femininity: delicate and beautiful. Back in 1993, critic Dave Hickey wrote The Invisible Dragon, a series of essays attacking what he identified as a reigning taboo against beauty in the late 20th century. Hickey needn’t have worried. Nearly three decades later, visual pleasure has not been choked off by the theoretical focus of conceptualism, nor by the postmodern dematerialization of the object. Nevertheless, beauty remains an uncomfortable territory for many contemporary artists, which makes the boldness of Weber’s aesthetics all the more compelling.
While the beauty taboo Hickey railed against
is surely linked to America’s puritanical inclinations, it may really have been
just another attempt to shut women out of fine art. In his 2017 book The Wild
Children of William Blake, art critic John Yau (an editor of Hyperallergic
Weekend) observed that the death of painting was conveniently declared in the
1980s, just as women were increasingly making themselves known as painters.
Women were leaders in the contemporaneous Pattern and Decoration movement,
which embraced beauty, using floral imagery to make a point about claiming for
art all things considered feminine.
The DNA of Pattern and Decoration is evident in Weber’s paintings and drawings, as is her interest in tapestry, another category historically associated with women. “Return no more” shows the influence of tapestry in her work, its shallow space receding as the eye ascends from the bottom to the top.
The feminist underpinnings of Weber’s work go further. Female figures alone populate these oneiric gardens, and their poses are not naturalistic but rigidly classical. Weber explained to me that she sources her figures (and sometimes her compositions) from canonical paintings such as Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” as well as art nouveau fairy tale illustration. The figures embody such cliches as the damsel in distress and the succubus, stereotypes that Weber says she’s had to deal with throughout her life and now seeks to reclaim. Through her paintings and drawings, she wrestles with the twin inheritances of art history and sexism.
To my eye, the figures are stiffly rendered and look pasted in, injecting an awkward note of frozen rationality into an otherwise unadulterated flow of psychic wilderness. Yet Weber has put them there for a reason, hinted at by the titles of the works, all mashups of lines from 19th-century poet Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters” (1832). Tennyson’s poem retells a passage from Homer’s Odyssey, in which sailors are trapped on an island by its magical flowers and fruit; they become passive and helpless in a deadly paradise. Weber’s Edenic worlds are fatal to men just as the pitcher plant kills through seduction: her paintings assert the strength and power in conventional notions of femininity.
In most of the works, the female figures
appear on the shore of a pond, lake, or stream. Looking at them I imagine
myself as Actaeon stumbling upon the graceful Artemis bathing among her
attendants. I will be turned into a stag, prey to my own hounds.
https://hyperallergic.com/661935/sarah-ann-weber-feminist-power-of-beauty-anat-ebgi/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WE073121&utm_content=WE073121+CID_9d0824340f9be1678368610cadb9e4dc&utm_source=hn
Esta exposición, disponible desde el 29 de julio en march.es, explora la relación del pintor holandés con la música
La Fundación Juan March publicó el jueves 29 de julio en su renovada página web una nueva exposición digital que, con el título Mondrian y la música, profundiza en la música que escuchaba el artista holandés Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), en la de sus amigos músicos, en la de los compositores en quienes influyó, y en su teoría musical.
Esta exposición, comisariada por José Luis Maire, bibliotecario de
música de la Fundación Juan March, por Inés Vallejo, jefa de proyecto
expositivo, y por Manuel Fontán del Junco, director de Exposiciones y Museos,
es la tercera que dedica la institución al pintor holandés. La primera fue
Mondrian. Óleos, acuarelas y dibujos, la primera monográfica celebrada en
España, en 1982. La segunda ‒y primera digital de la institución‒, El caso Mondrian,
rescató del archivo de la institución las voces de
artistas que le conocieron ‒como Max Bill o Harry Holtzman‒, y exploró su interés por otras artes, su relación con España, su influencia en otros creadores y cómo su radical pureza artística ha sido
engullida por el consumo de masas. Esta tercera exposición, Mondrian y la música, disponible en march.es durante un año,
invita a adentrarse en su pasión por la música, un interés fundamental tanto
para su vida personal como para su creación artística, pero apenas atendido
hasta el momento.
Mondrian era un entusiasta del jazz, y la mayor parte de su
colección de discos estaba dedicada a este género y a los bailes modernos.
Afincado primero en París y luego en Nueva York, el gramófono sonaba
constantemente en su estudio, donde pintaba acompañado de la música de Duke
Ellington, Bix Beiderbecke o Paul Whiteman.
En los años veinte, Mondrian se apuntó a clases de bailes de salón,
y solía acudir a los cafés parisinos, donde se le podía encontrar bailando con
un estilo muy particular, que producía un extraño contraste con su aspecto
austero. A su llegada a Estados Unidos quiso conocer los estilos musicales en
boga en el momento y se interesó especialmente por el boogie-woogie, que
escuchó por primera vez por sugerencia de su amigo Harry Holtzman en su primera
o segunda noche en Nueva York. La estructura musical de este género le sirvió
de modelo directo para su pintura, como muestra su famosa Broadway
Boogie-woogie. De todo ello da cuenta la primera parte de la muestra, “En el
estudio de Piet Mondrian: músicas escuchadas y bailadas”.
La segunda sección, “Al oído de Mondrian: teósofos, ruidistas
italianos y amigos, compositores e intérpretes” relata la adhesión de Mondrian
a la Sociedad Teosófica en 1909 y su relación con compositores como el teósofo
Jakob van Domselaer o el holandés Daniël Ruyneman, que influyeron notablemente
en su teoría estética y en su concepción del ritmo visual. Aborda también su
amistad con una de las principales pianistas del dadaísmo, Nelly van Moorsel, a
la que conoció en París en los años veinte.
A lo largo del siglo xx, el pintor influyó igualmente en otros
muchos compositores, como Thelonious Monk, que comparaba su búsqueda de la
precisión en cada pulsación con la del pintor al disponer las líneas y colores
sobre el lienzo. También en Morton Feldman, Louis Andriessen, Iannis Xenakis o
Karel Goeyvaerts, y, más recientemente, en algunos artistas como Sándor Vály
que han realizado piezas estrechamente ligadas a su pintura. En esas
influencias se centra la tercera sección de la exposición, “Piet Mondrian
resuena en…”
Además, el pintor desarrolló su propia teoría musical, como
demuestra la colección de citas de la última sección de la exposición,
“Mondrian: sobre el sonido, la música y los músicos”, que contiene referencias
bibliográficas y discográficas para el investigador...........
https://www.march.es/es
Il 2021 è un anno speciale per tutti gli appassionati di canto, e in particolare di “tenorismo” all’italiana, perché si ricordano i cento anni dalla scomparsa di Enrico Caruso e dalla nascita di Franco Corelli e Giuseppe Di Stefano, due tenori molto scaligeri che hanno simbolicamente raccolto l’eredità del cantante più famoso che sia mai esistito (per intenderci, il primo ad aver venduto più di un milione di dischi).
Il prossimo 2 agosto, esattamente un secolo dopo la morte di Caruso, sarà lanciata online la prima mostra della Scala pensata interamente per il digitale, dal titolo “Caruso, Corelli, Di Stefano – Miti del canto italiano”. La mostra, curata dal critico musicale Mattia Palma, sarà un percorso immaginifico sviluppato da Punto Rec Studio, Factory Multimediale per la cultura, l’arte e la musica, con un allestimento virtuale all’interno del Teatro con video, ascolti, fotografie e perfino un concerto “impossibile” ricreato sul palcoscenico della Scala e tante altre sorprese da scoprire su questi magnifici artisti.
La mostra è un’iniziativa del Ministero degli
Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale, diffusa in tutto il mondo
negli Istituti Italiani di Cultura. L’accesso totalmente gratuito sarà
disponibile dal sito della Scala, teatroallascala.org, sul sito del Museo e su
quello del MAECI, Italiana.esteri.it.
Seguiteci anche su Facebook e Instagram
@museoscala.
https://www.museoscala.org/eventi-e-mostre/mostre/mostre-passate/tre-tenori/
HASTA SEPTIEMBRE, 2021, NUEVA YORK
“Ustedes se preguntarán cómo es que dentro de una familia de clase se considerara a una amante como un elemento más del mobiliario; pues bien, la razón es que mi madre toleraba esta situación, y ahí es donde radica el misterio. ¿Por qué lo hacía? ¿Y cuál era mi papel en este juego? Yo era un peón. Se suponía que Sadie (la niñera) estaba ahí para ser mi maestra, cuando en realidad, madre, tú me utilizabas para saber los pasos de tu marido. A eso se le llama abuso infantil.
” Estas palabras de la escultora se complementan muy bien con las que siguen a continuación: “Una hija constituye una decepción. Cuando se traía una hija a este mundo, tenía que ser perdonada. Así, por ejemplo se perdonó a mi madre gracias a que yo era la viva imagen de mi padre. Ese fue mi primer golpe de suerte. Quizás esa fuera la razón por la cual él siempre me trató como al hijo que siempre había deseado tener. Además, yo estaba suficientemente dotada como para satisfacer a mi padre y ésta sería la segunda condición afortunada de mi infancia.”
Tras esta presentación especial, mi invitación para que dibujen y
redondeen cada uno su propia Louise Bourgeois, un territorio inabarcable.
Y
ahora un secreto a voces: con la presencia omnipotente y vigilante de los
padres se vive regular. Sin ella seguramente peor. Es el modelo, un cierto
canibalismo ritual mutuo.
Alicia Perris
A dual biography of Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger and exploration through their eyes of Rome around the time of the eruption of Vesuvius.
Above the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius is spewing
thick ash into the sky. The inhabitants of nearby villages stand in their
doorways, eyes cast on the unknown. Pliny the Elder, a historian, admiral of the fleet, and author of
an extraordinary encyclopaedia of Natural History, dares to draw closer to the
phenomenon. He perishes beneath the volcano. His 17-year-old nephew, Pliny the
Younger, survives.
The elder Pliny left behind an enormous compendium of knowledge,
his Natural History offering observations on everything, from the moon, to
elephants, to the efficacy of ground millipedes in healing ulcers. Adopted as
his late uncle’s son, Pliny the Younger inherited his notebooks – his pearls of
wisdom – and endeavoured to keep his memory alive. But what became of the young man after the disaster?
The book resurrects the `father and son’ to
explore their beliefs about life, death and the natural world in the first
century AD. It is about both the elder Pliny, who perished in the disaster, and
the younger Pliny, who grew up to become a lawyer, senator, poet, collector of
villas, curator of drains, and personal representative of the emperor overseas.
Counting the historian Tacitus, biographer Suetonius, and poet Martial among
his close friends, Pliny the Younger chronicled his experiences from the
catastrophic eruption through the dark days of terror under Emperor Domitian to
the gentler times of Emperor Trajan.
Interweaving the younger Pliny’s Letters with
ideas and extracts from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Daisy Dunn brings
their world back to life. Working from the original sources, she celebrates two
of the greatest minds from antiquity and their influence on the world that came
after them.
http://www.daisydunn.co.uk/books/in-the-shadow-of-vesuvius
BBC PROMS, 2021
Image: Dalia Stasevska © Sanna Lehto
First half on BBC Two at 8pm, second half on
BBC Four at 9.05pm
https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/edhcd4
Il festival Elba isola musicale d’Europa, che si svolgerà dal 26 agosto al 12 settembre, taglia quest’anno il traguardo delle 25 edizioni. Tanti gli artisti italiani e stranieri che si esibiranno sull’Isola.
Dal celebre violinista lettone Gidon Kremer che aprirà il festival con la Kremerata Baltica e un omaggio ad Astor Piazzolla al violista russo Yuri Bashmet che nell’ormai lontano 1997 fu tra i fondatori dello stesso festival, dal violoncellista Mario Brunello con il Coro del Friuli Venezia Giulia all’attore Massimo Popolizio impegnato in un progetto dantesco insieme all’Orchestra Leonore diretta da Daniele Giorgi, fino al trombettista jazz Fabrizio Bosso ed a molti altri artisti, la 25esima edizione del festival elbano, diretta anche quest’anno da quel George Edelman che l’ha ideato e creato, sarà impreziosita dall’esecuzione dei quartetti di Haydn nei luoghi napoleonici dell’isola ed anche da un omaggio a Dante Alighieri, dati i 200 anni dalla scomparsa di Napoleone Bonaparte che all’Elba legò il suo nome ed i 700 anni da quella di Dante.
«E’ un festival importante che quest’anno, oltre a celebrare il 25esimo anniversario, trova il modo di onorare il 200esimo anniversario della morte di Napoleone e il 700esimo della scomparsa di Dante – commenta il presidente della Regione Toscana, Eugenio Giani – E’ una rassegna che dà lustro all’intera Toscana e che pone al centro della scena musicale internazionale l’isola che proprio Napoleone elevò a Stato sovrano».
Il festival Elba isola musicale d’Europa è stato pensato, fin dall’inizio, per inserirsi nel contesto ambientale e storico dell’isola. Oggi l’impegno degli organizzatori è a favore della sostenibilità ambientale e in armonia con il territorio. I concerti sono programmati nel tardo pomeriggio e in luoghi suggestivi, tra cui le ville romane di Portoferraio, la Linguella e quella delle Grotte, e il Santuario della Madonna del Monte a Marciana. Il festival non intende valorizzare solo la musica, ma anche la natura e l’arte, nella prospettiva di coinvolgere l’intero territorio. Quest’anno, inoltre, il festival tornerà sull’isola di Pianosa e per la prima volta ci sarà un concerto nel carcere di Porto Azzurro.
Il festival Elba isola musicale d’Europa viene realizzato con il sostegno della Regione Toscana, delle Amministrazioni comunali di Portoferraio, Marciana, Marciana Marina, e Rio, del Parco nazionale dell’Arcipelago Toscano e di Visit Elba.
Du 13 mai au 19 septembre 2021, le musée de la romanité de Nîmes, en collaboration avec le musée du Louvre, organise une exposition inédite sur le culte impérial, thème majeur de l’histoire romaine pourtant méconnu du grand public.
De la République à l’Empire : la création du statut d’empereur.
L’exposition se lie étroitement au règne d’Octavien, petit-neveu de Jules César, plus connu sous le nom d’Auguste. Devenu maître de Rome en 31 av. J.-C. à l’issue d’une guerre civile, il impose habilement une nouvelle forme de gouvernement respectueuse en apparence des institutions républicaines : le Principat. Il accapare progressivement la puissance de la plupart des magistratures traditionnelles, concentrant le pouvoir politique entre ses mains et celle de son entourage. Le culte de ses qualités, vertus et actions est progressivement intégré dans la religion publique sans créer de rupture avec le cadre religieux traditionnel. Il ne sera ainsi jamais assimilé à un dieu ni destinataire d’un culte direct de son vivant en Occident. Tout au long de son règne, Auguste s’attache à donner de sa personne, de sa famille, de son projet politique, une image propre à légitimer son pouvoir et son action. L’idéologie du nouveau régime s’exprime à travers différents « médias » : littérature, numismatique, sculpture, arts précieux, mais aussi à travers l’architecture et le portrait de l’empereur partout dans l’espace public. À la mort d’Auguste, le Sénat vote les honores caelestes, « honneurs célestes », ouvrant la voie à la divination de la plupart des empereurs romains après leur mort.
Sur les traces des empereurs à Nîmes
Le patrimoine antique de la Ville de Nîmes compte deux fondations
religieuses étroitement liées à la promotion de la dynastie impériale julio-claudienne
: la « Maison Carré », temple dédié aux petits-fils et héritiers d’Auguste,
Gaius et Lucius Caesar et l’ « Augusteum » du site de la Fontaine dont
subsistent le « temple de Diane » et un angle de fronton du propylée qui occupe
aujourd’hui une place centrale dans le parcours muséographique du musée de la
Romanité. L’exposition souhaite replacer ces monuments dans leur contexte
historique en explorant le thème, riche et complexe, de l’expression religieuse
du pouvoir politique dans la société romaine.
L’empereur : intermédiaire privilégié entre les hommes et les dieux
Le concept assez réducteur de « culte impérial », récurrent dans
les publications spécialisées, recouvre une grande diversité d’hommages autour
de la personne de l’empereur, qui incarne l’Etat et garantit sa prospérité.
Divinisé après sa mort, l’empereur apparaît comme un intermédiaire privilégié
entre les hommes et les dieux.
Rassemblant des sculptures, monnaies et inscriptions, l’exposition tente de montrer comment l’association, parfois ambigüe, des références divines et de la fonction impériale s’est traduite dans l’iconographie mais aussi dans les programmes architecturaux et décoratifs des lieux dédies à la célébration de l’activité impériale. Elle abordera également les modalités et l’organisation des cultes impériaux en Narbonnaise. Parmi les 149 œuvres exposées, 30 ont été prêtées par le département des Antiquités grecques, étrusques et romaines du musée du Louvre.
Commissaires
Manuella Lambert, conservateur du patrimoine au musée de la
Romanité à Nîmes, assistée de Cécile Carrier, chargée d’études.
https://www.louvre.fr/en-ce-moment/vie-du-musee/l-empereur-romain-un-mortel-parmi-les-dieux
