On 1 and 2 June 2024, music and paintings from the Baroque era came together in the Hermitage. The Armorial Hall of the Winter Palace was the setting for two concerts given by the world-famous musicAeterna orchestra and choir.
“Music is a part of the life of the museum. Today we are beginning the sub-programme with musicAeterna to accompany the exhibition ’ARS VIVENDI. Frans Snyders and Seventeenth-Century Flemish Still Lifes’. The Hermitage has a whole strategy for the presence of music. We have the Hermitage Theatre with its own separate programme. We have concerts within the functioning museum, concerts in the Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace, evening concerts in the halls,” Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, said, greeting the guests at the start of the first concert. “Today we shall be hearing music in the Armorial Hall, where we have above us the coats-of-arms of all the provinces of the Russian Empire. And I would like you to remember that Russian history is always present alongside you.”
The programme by musicAeterna took the form of a digest of the European high Baroque that included instrumental compositions, arias from operas and oratorios, religious motets by French, German and Italian composers. The 17th- and 18th-century music was presented in accordance with the principles of historically informed performance. The soloists were musicAeterna’s own artistes: sopranos Irina Terentyeva and Irina Bagina, countertenor Andrei Nemzer, bass Alexei Svetov, violinist Vladislav Pesin and cellist Rabbani Aldangor.
“At the concerts in the Hermitage, the musicAeterna choir and orchestra demonstrated various facets of their capabilities: there were solo, instrumental and vocal compositions; a mixed choir and a vocal octet performed. The value of the programme is in its diversity: Baroque France was represented by excerpts from Rameau’s operas, Italy by the music of Vivaldi and Lotti, Germany by Bach and Handel. Moreover the Armorial Hall has the acoustics best suited to a chamber orchestra playing historical instruments with sinew strings,” Boris Polonsky, musicAeterna’s chief choirmaster, commented.
On the same evening, in an entirely special atmosphere, the audience were able to visit one of the State Hermitage main exhibitions of 2024 – “ARS VIVENDI. Frans Snyders and Seventeenth-Century Flemish Still Lifes”. The large-scale project has brought together more than 70 paintings by Flemish artists in the still life and animal genres from the 17th-century heyday of art in Flanders. The works on display reflect the main stages in the evolution of the Flemish still life as an independent genre, its diversity of types, as well as the range of individual artistic manners. The exhibition immerses visitors in the world of Baroque-era Flemish art, a realm filled with exotic rarities, sumptuous bouquets, floral garlands and hunting trophies.
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The collaboration between the State Hermitage and the musicAeterna ensemble goes back several years now. Over that period, musicAeterna under the leadership of Teodor Currentzis has become a musical Friend of the Hermitage. This joint activity has led to the successful implementation of a whole series of projects. Those have included the concert Im Äther by the musicAeterna choir, which took place during the Hermitage Days 2023 in the Atrium of the General Staff building, and the concert by soloists from the choir accompanied by a string quartet and harpsichord to complement the exhibition “Diderot’s Salons. Exhibitions of Contemporary Art in 18th-century Paris”. Another special event was the 2021 “Musical Dimension” project prepared jointly by the State Hermitage and the musicAeterna orchestra on the initiative of the VTB Bank especially for the major exhibition “Albrecht Dürer. 550th Anniversary of the Artist’s Birth” in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace. The conductor Teodor Currentzis and the residents of musicAeterna created original selections of musical works for several sections of the display, allowing visitors to immerse themselves totally in the context of the exhibition and engage in personal meditation one-on-one with the art.
