In Opera's Music

Saint-Saëns' concertos and many of his chamber music works are both technically difficult and transparent, requiring the skills of a virtuoso. The later chamber music pieces, such as the second violin sonata, the second cello sonata, and the second piano trio, are less accessible to a listener than earlier pieces in the same form. They were composed and performed when Saint-Saëns was already slipping out of popularity and, as a result, they are little known. They show a willingness to experiment with more progressive musical language and to abandon lyricism and charm for more profound expression.

The piano music, while not as deep or as challenging as that of some of his contemporaries, occupies the stylistic ground between Liszt and Ravel. At times brilliant, transparent and idiomatic, the music for two pianos includes the Variations on a Theme by Beethoven, the Scherzo, a palindromic piece that uses a blend of modern tonalities and conventional gestures, and the Caprice arabe, a rhythmically inventive fantasy that pays homage to the music of northern Africa. Although Saint-Saëns was considered old-fashioned in later life, he explored many new forms and reinvigorated some older ones. His compositional approach was inspired by French classicism, which makes him an important forerunner of the neoclassicism of Ravel and others.

In performance, Saint-Saëns is said to have been "unequalled on the organ", and rivaled by only a few on the piano. However, Saint-Saëns's concert style was restrained, subtle, and cool; he sat unmoving at the piano. His playing was marked by extraordinarily even scales and passagework, great speed, and aristocratic refinement. The recordings he left at the end of his life give glimpses of these traits. He was often charged with being unemotional and business-like, less memorable than other more charismatic performers. He was probably the first pianist to publicly perform a cycle of all the Mozart piano concertos. In some cases these influenced his own piano concertos; for example, the first movement of his 4th Piano Concerto in C minor strongly resembles the last movement of Mozart's 24th Concerto, which is in the same key. In turn, his own concertos appear to have influenced those of Sergei Rachmaninoff and other later Romantic composers. Throughout his life, Saint-Saëns continued to play with the technique taught to him by Stamaty, using the strength of the hand rather than the arm. Claudio Arrau never forgot the ease with which Saint-Saëns played (he cites Chopin's fourth scherzo as an example).

Saint-Saëns wrote five symphonies, although only three of these are numbered. He withdrew the first, written for a Mozartian-scale orchestra, and the third, a competition piece. His symphonies are a significant contribution to the genre during a period when the French symphonic tradition was otherwise in decline. Saint-Saëns also contributed voluminously to the French concertante literature; he wrote five piano concertos, three violin concertos, two cello concertos, and about twenty smaller concertante works for soloist and orchestra, including a colorfully orchestrated piano fantasy, Africa; the Havanaise and the Introduction and Rondo capriccioso for violin and orchestra; and the Morceau de concert for harp and orchestra. Of the concertos, the Second Piano concerto is one of the most popular of virtuoso piano concertos, and the Third Violin Concerto and First Cello Concerto also remain popular.

by Kengo Kuma

Placed second at the Taipei City Museum of Art Competition, the proposal designed by Kengo Kuma+Associates derives its iconicity from emphasizing two distinct design tendencies. The first relates to the idea of connectivity: the museum is a cultural and communication hub, providing a space for gatherings, exhibitions and workshops. An urbanistic attitude is noticeable in the configuration of the structure. The skin acts as a canopy- accessible and welcoming, it shelters a public space below. The pavilion-like programmatic distribution contributes to the overall impression of the museum being part of the cityscape. The main hall is connected to a nearby train station, cable car, riverbank trail, demystifying the museum culture, interpreting it as an integral part of the urban experience.

The Museum’s other striking feature is the double skin system. It has an important role in the sustainability of the building. It is designed as a steel mesh of the structural framework, capped with diverse elements including EFTE cushions, LEDs, ventilation louvers, solar panels and green roof. This highly breathable envelope extends all the way to the ground in places to create shaded spaces. And at night, the building is illuminated by energy-efficient LEDs, creating an impressive lighting effect.

 

Negative Pockets

In this project by Cheng Gong for a public library the  main idea is to emphasize the order and relationship between solids and voids. The final geometry derives from petals of flowers and small branches from trunks, the building  walls are two sides within the site and grow like a generation of branches in their early development phases.

Floors are inserted into the volume to divide spaces vertically while creating a domino structural system. Branches are detached out of a bounding solid which is restricted by the site so that the rest of the space in the solid box plays the role of an envelop. As a result, voids are large spaces with abundant light. In contrast, in spite of providing light to the other interior spaces, visitors are able to “touch” and “feel” the negative spaces in between the masses.

The corner strategy comes to a public space created by a smooth transition as a lobby function. The gaps in between the solids follow a strong alignment order to reinforce the envelop form. Transportation is organized in-between the slope volume as wells as voids. Interior spatial order follows with the growing of the “branches”. Ornamental details such as creases are applied to the surfaces’ edges to emphasize its geometry.

 

the New MomA

Located in Warsaw city centre, the new MoMa Museum would be a landmark cultural institution for the new millennium. Designed by Finish ALA Architecture, the building is a strong statement, capable of challenging the iconic status of the neighboring Palace of Culture, built in the Soviet-era.

The project uses reflectiveness and transparency to create contrasting effects, responding to the definition of exhibition spaces, as well as to the surrounding  urban fabric:

“The project has only two surfaces. The glass wall represents and enables the digital world of direct, location-independent communication. It works locally as a gigantic shop window and display board, utilizing visual communication methods from transparency to manual manipulation and digital projection. It reveals, protects and enhances the physical, “real” art behind it.

The sculptural curving wall is a solid and permanent feature born out of the current conditions and inspirations. It is real and mesmerizing, and will remain as a document of our time while the glass wall keeps evolving and the contents changing. It is clad in a chromium-like finish, thus literally reflecting the local surroundings in a unique way. The museum interior is delineated by these two surfaces. It is a combination of their different qualities. It has generic and unique aspects, light and dark moments and permanent and temporary features. The art can be totally isolated inside, or it can be totally exposed to the outside. The art can be inspired by the space and take on its unique qualities, or it can ignore the space and turn it into a new condition just for itself. The amount and quality of light can be modified by manipulating the glass wall. The large gallery spaces can be divided into smaller units, or the whole museum can act as one continuous space.”
 

a Palatine Modern Art

Glamorous painting gallery, housed in the last Medici residence, later to be also the residence of the Habsburg-Lorraine family and of the Royal family of Italy when Florence was capital of the country. The display does not follow –differently from the Uffizi- a chronological order, it still mirrows instead the original Baroque style, with paintings displayed according to similarity of the subjects, frames, size of the canvas or colours. Among artworks here, many by Raffaello, Tiziano, Andrea del Sarto, Rubens, Van Dyke and Caravaggio, purchased by the Medicis or donated to them. Most of them belonged to the collections of Cardinal Leopold and Prince Ferdinand. As in the Uffizi, the collection is fully international, with a high number of Dutch and Flemish paintings. From the Gallery of the Statues a balcony opens up on the courtyard and offers a splendid view onto the Boboli Gardens

http://www.florence-museum.com/palatina.htm

cities in Clouds, to keep Walking

There is the idea of floating in space: the impression of walking on air that is achieved by creating a network of balloons, suspended on spider webs. Technically, the project resembles Buckminster Fuller experiments on geodesic domes. There is also another layer to the exhibition: the idea of being able to physically experience the effects of somebody else’s movements in space. The concept evolves from an idea of coordinating behaviour and environment, without the didactics of the current environmentalist approach. The body is exposed to physical changes in the environment, directly caused by another human being. The installation explores what the author calls “a realizable utopia”.

The exhibition “Cloud Cities” is currently placed in the Hamburger Banhof in Berlin. Visitors are free to enter around 20 balloon models of various sizes-sort of a hanging settlement.  The transparent balloons are accessible through ladders. Seen from underneath, people seem to be walking on air.
Tomás Saraceno’s work, which is used as organic fencing once inhabited by plants and sometimes kept floating in space only by black cable networks, is referred by the artist as “biospheres” or “Flying Garden”. The terminology itself suggests that Saraceno draws his inspiration from natural sciences, biology in particular, as well as architecture, the discipline he initially studied.

Speaking to Desert

Singing dunes is a phenomenon found exclusively in desert environments. “The sounds are produced when grains drum against one another; exciting elastic waves on the dune surface of the sand bed acts like the membrane of a loudspeaker.”The sounds resemble the beating of a drum or the noise of a low-flying jet. They can be heard up to 10 km away.

The skyscraper was designed by Barbara Leonardi and Oliver Dibrova as part of Hani Rashid Studio. The main inspiration was found in a phenomenon of singing dunes. Hypothetically located in Dubai, the project is a hybrid space, with diverse surfaces representing different programmatic conditions. A spiraled structure continues the public space and contains four plugged in hotel-units, which can act independent from each other and are specialized on diverse topics (business hotel, recreation hotel, sports hotel and city hotel).

The final configuration of the building is set upon through an experiment: a plate or drum is forced to vibrate historically with a violin bow or with a speaker. A fine sand or powder is sprinkled on the surface and allowed to settle. It sets at those non-vibrating parts of the surface, namely the nodes of vibration. Using an equation for the zeros of standing wave on square plate, different sound-files are extracted and used as input. They’re translated into frequency and amplitude, eventually generating a 3d structure.

Anisotropia based on a Piano

Anisotropia is based on Klavierstück I, a composition for piano by Orproject director Christoph Klemmt. The piano piece uses a twelve tone row which is repeated and altered by the different voices, in order to create complex rhythmic patterns. Anisotropia becomes the physical manifestation of Klavierstück I, a frozen piece of music. The installation is based on a simple strip morphology instead of a twelve tone row, which creates the structure, openings and rhythm within itself, its repetition happening in space instead of time. Layers of the strips form the wall system, and the shifting and alteration of these patterns results in the formation of complex architectural rhythms which are used to control the light, view and shading properties of the structure. The system has also been used for our design proposal for Busan Opera House.

Shifting tones
Klavierstück I uses a twelve tone row which starts with the lowest key of the piano. After its first cycle the row gets repeated, though shifted up by a halftone. However rather than translating up every tone by a halftone, only the lowest tone of the row is translated up by one octave. Like this the row remains the same, but its range has been shifted. In the next repetition this shift continues, but the range now also gets reduced in its size: The lowest tone gets translated up by one octave again, and the second lowest tone gets dropped out, so that only the remaining eleven tones of the row are played. Instead of the twelve tones the range now only covers eleven tones, and also its length is reduced accordingly.

The range of the twelve tone row continues to be reduced and shifted upwards until only one tone is left in each repetition of the original row. Then the range grows again, and still moving upwards goes through further modulations: The different voices of the piece are starting to separate, the size of the different parallel ranges starts to diverge, they move around each other, until finally they grow together again, still moving up and their range fading out with the highest key of the piano.

Piano Piece No.1 is based on a simple row of the twelve tones, but by shifting and translating its range of influence, complex and continuously evolving rhythmic patterns are generated and turned into a floating field of sound.

Structure and light
The proposed façade system becomes the physical manifestation of Klavierstück I. It uses parallel bamboo lamella which are creating the rhythmic structure. The basic unit of two strips is creating form into two dimensions, and becomes a straight extrusion into the third dimension. Like this it gets multiplied into the first two dimensions, where it develops and gets modified in the same way in which the twelve tone row gets repeated and modified in time.

The extrusion in the third dimensions allows for a horizontal modification during the development of the wall, which is used in a linear direction similar to the continuous upwards movement of the piano piece. In the piano piece always only the upper few tones of each twelve tone row are audible and create the floating field of rhythmic transformations. Similarly in the installation, only the peaks of each strip become visible and create a floating field of structure, shadow and light.

Designed by: Xin Wang and Christoph Klemmt
Project Team: Shuai Yang, Duan Duan, Haobin Lee

biomimicry Concert Hall

This project is a design proposal conceived by Philip H. Wilck during his studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna under the guidance of Hernan Diaz Alonso. The project for a Concert Hall at the Stadtpark in Vienna rethinks the concept of a concert hall through the architectural emsemble of different geometrical and material configurations that offer the opportunity for a multilayered and complex music experience. The system includes central positioned classical, symmetric concert hall geometry, and two areas created as sound shells related to biological shell geometries (biomimicry) such as an ear or a muscle structure. Other elements provide spaces and areas for a fully energy self-sufficient building through host interaction and active materials.

Wilck rethinks the concert hall by intruding botanical gardens functioning as structure and evolving absolutistic symmetric building configurations that morph into free floating geometries. The project analyzes system hierarchies with an adequate circulation organization.

Key elements coming from Romanticism are also important for the proposal such as: untamed wilderness, the unfinished, and the validation of obscure perceptions. Committed to the futility to comprehend the world with the aid of rational systems, as well as from the inferiority of every perfect thought compared to the inherent laws of nature. A New Romanticism approaches new areas in design and architecture processes – emerging aestetic paradigms and systematic specifications.
 

Earth, Water, Sky

This project is a winning entry conceived by architects Chi Wai Chan, Xinyu Wan, and Geng Ke for a competition to design an arts and cultural square at Lake Sanyon in Daqing, China. The project examines the relationships between the elements of water, sky, and earth. A waterfront promenade that ensues the formal attributes and fluidity of the water, a 1,394 m long canopy with LED display that transpires the form of the clouds, and a ground condition of self-similar marine lifeform that establishes view corridors to the lake.

These three design elements serve as the organizing  apparatus for the design of the square.
The architecture of the individual buildings experiments with a contemporary aesthetics attainable  through digital design.  Tools such as Maya, Rhino and Grasshopper were utilized during the  design process. But considerations were also given to achieving a balance between buildability and creativity. The architecture and the aesthetic affects were shaped by the materials and construction methods available, and by considerations of the process and fabrication technologies available in translating a digital model into reality.