10/04/2017

h.21 Auditorium San Fedele

Francesco Zago
Cantus a Arvo Pärt

BJ Nilsen 
Live

Sound engineer: Filippo Berbenni

B.J. Nilsen has been in residence in San Fedele to prepare his performance specifically developed for the Acusmonium Sator. Time useful  to get to know the instrument, to choose the sound material and to experiment with the projection in space. The Swedish musician, based in Amsterdam, works mainly on the sound of nature and the city and its effects on humans.

The second part sees a new project by guitarist and composer Francesco Zago, starting from an opera by Arvo Pärt. In 1977 the Estonian composer wrote the Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten to mourn the death of such a profound musical personality of “unusual purity”. Cantus is a meditation on death and silence: Francesco Zago reinterprets Pärt’s passage, expanding its proportions and revealing its mechanisms – the mensural canon, the tintinnabuli technique – which bring it closer to Ligeti’s “growing organisms” and at the same time make it a page with unusually dramatic features.