Notti di Luce

Our investigation on the figure of Saint’Alexander, started two years ago, allowed us to develop the theme of peace and more pragmatically the spiritual legacy of Bergamo’s Patron to Bergamo’s community during the following one thousand and three hundred years through the story of three persons who lived vividly putting at the center of their existence the same originary principles of solidarity and peace: Paola Elisabetta Cerioli, Luigi Palazzolo and Pope John XXIII.
From here the idea of putting on stage not only a new multi-disciplinary show of theatre, music and light, but also to enlarge the focus on a wider cultural background and to extend the main theme of peace to some people who, in the field of philosophy, music, civil and political commitment have been able to offer, through their belief, works and deeds, stimulations to  feel, think and build peace.
A kind of “Melting pax” that, specifically, realizes also in a photographic exbition set up in the Sentierone boulevard that combines fragments of eighteen authors and eighteen pictures by Gianfranco Rota.
But not only. In 2009 there is also the 20th anniversary of the fall of Berlin wall, a symbolic act that ended the long tunnel of cold war and laid the basis of the new geo-political structures.
Therefore we decided to offer, in music, two contigous although different visions of the turmoil that, since the 1950s/1960s, contributed to the creation of a new spiritual, civil and politic conscience.
The work A love Supreme by Coltrane, here presented in an original version for jazz quartet and strings orchestra, represents the belief and pray in music of a big Afro-American artist elaborated during the crucial years of cold war disagreeements and unviolent struggles for the civil rights by Martin Luther King, decorated with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 (the same year of publication of A love supreme).

Kennedy Dream is still more explicit, is a work never performed in Italy, that combines the clear and inspired writing for orchestra by Oliver Nelson with some fragments of the most significant speeches of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who, together with fundamental people for the conquest of civil rights in different parts of the world left a permanent sign in contemporary society: Gandhi, Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Aung San Suu Kyi.

From these considerations new stimulations for the use of light especially concerning urban and architectural light originated. Besides the already cited photographic exhbition, Melting Pax, that underlines the axis of Sentierone, we wanted to underline, still more significantly the place where the festival starts up.
The facade of Basilica of Sant’Alessandro, the churchyard, the column and the contiguous area will be enlightened as in daytime in the dark of night offering an evident sign of recognition of the place where the martyrdom of our Patron took place and where, at the same time, our community was born, which still today gathers in a serene atmosphere of feast and meeting.
Also the facade of Santa Maria Maggiore will be enlightened through the screening of some iconographies taken mainly by Lotto’s tarsias with the title “The tarsias of peace” during the three concerts which will take place within.

In the programming of this year’s Notti di Luce we could not miss some appointments particularly awaited by Bergamo’s audience of any age.
In the square of the Town Council two concerts dedicated to authorial music will take place: the concert of Enrico Ruggeri, accompanied by Notti di Luce Orchestra, and of Sergio Caputo.
Magic and illusionism, that last year were very successful, will be presented at the Donizetti Theatre with David Cats and some prestigious guests, and in the park of Frizzoni Palace with a show for children. Again with a target reserved to families and children, Notti di Luce introduces a new genre: musical, that through a mix of dance, music and light takes inspiration from the characters of Walt Disney’s The Lion King and from African fairytales.
Then the theatre course, started in the last edition with the experiment of the Foucault pendulum, will go on through science and art. From pendulum to prism. On this occasion the experience, at the same time simple and complex, of refraction and colour decomposition, will be presented.
At the end of the shows on 3rd/4th/5th September light will entertain through a show of music and visual art proposed by the group Seven Cuba in Dante Square.
We won’t miss classical music with the exhibition of the Swedish chorus of Vasteras Basilica and the concert of the organ player Daniel Pandolfo, within the The Basilica Organ festival ofFondazione Mia.

Claudio Angeleri 
Art Director of Notti di Luce