I CAMERISTI DELLA SCALA

When I asked Luca Artioli to accompany us to Moscow and the Baltic countries on a concert tour with Antonio Vivaldi’s Quattro Stagioni, I could not imagine what the outcome of the encounter between a creative and poetic photographer with our music would be.And not even Luca, reluctant at first, believed that he would succeed so intensely in translating into color,movement and visual energy those everyday gestures with which we produce music, emotion and energy through sound. Music and the figurative arts share certain terms commonly used in describing their qualities.Tone, for example, which in music indicates the pitch of the notes on which a whole musical passage is based, and in painting the gradation of the coloring on which the artist composes his painting; color, which in music represents the timbre and volume of the sounds, and in figurative arts the intensity of chromatic gradations. But music itself is color: every musical tone corresponds to a different tone of color, and every tone to a state of mind that the artist or composer seek to express. Antonio Vivaldi, like Luca Artioli, uses different media such as music, poetry and intense pictorial images to express the succession of the seasons, the rustling of the wind amid the trees, the energy of nature as it blossoms, the flowing of water and the passing of time, but above all the incessant flowing of the movements of the spirit that continuously entwine human emotions with nature.They both do so by using the tones of sounds, colors and poetic evocations: E major for Spring by Vivaldi is the bright blue of the sky and joy at the rebirth of nature; the G minor of Summer is the yellow ochre of the parched countryside and at the same time the languid abundance of the shimmering hot summer; the F major of autumn is the dark green of the meadows and the pleasure of the fire and the grape harvest; F minor is Winter with the white blanket of snow and the night of the soul.

Gianluca Scandola

Violinist and President of the Chamber Musicians of La Scala Opera House