Trento Symphonia

An orchestra, a choir and a large group of boys who serve as “living music stands” are shot while playing Gustav Mahler’s 8th Symphony in a mountain landscape at early sunset. As the musical performance progresses, the musicians, led by their “living lecterns”, begin to move in a precise choreography. At certain times of execution and movement in space, heterogeneous groups of musicians, singers and the living music stands suddenly disappear and, with them, the sounds they produce. Slowly but surely, the music becomes a sound-object caught in the moment of its erosion, which corresponds to the slow dissolution of the vision of the landscape, due to encroaching darkness. In the end, music as a sound-object and the landscape as a visual object are transformed into something identical but, at the same time, completely changed from their original configurations. In this way, in Trento Symphonia, the landscape becomes a moment of connection between contemplation, correspondence and imagination.