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Rating: It's not the first time that Glass performs in the Etnean city; on other occasions, he has already stopped in Catania where, as he himself states, he has always encountered a warm welcome from the audience.
Apart from the concert, this time Glass also met, in the auditorium of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of Catania, anyone who wanted to be present at what, although brief, was an excursion not so much of his artistic life but of the very concept of music and art for Glass.
Glass began his artistic career within the minimalist movement, which seeks to transfer the rhythmic component typical of sound realities such as those in Africa and Asia into the musical structures of the Western tradition. But he later broadened his perspective, leading to more complex developments, but always within the realm of experimentalism that explores spaces so far little considered by Western music.
"POWAQQATSI" (the work presented at this concert) is part of this phase of liberation from minimalist structures in the strict sense. It is the second installment of the QATSI TRILOGY by Goffrey Reggio: a revolutionary film trilogy that surpasses the limits of narrative cinema to arrive at what the director himself has called a kind of "cinema-concert", where the fusion of music and images becomes the means to outline what, according to Reggio, language can no longer describe: the world we live in, approached with ancient ideas and outdated formulas.
In this magnificent portrait of human nature and how it impacts the surrounding world, music plays a fundamental role. Glass himself, at the meeting with the students, specified that one of the revolutions brought about by these films is the relevance of the soundtrack, which becomes the means to fill the context outlined by the images with the intended emotion. It is therefore not a secondary element; the director and musician are on the same level, collaborating, influencing each other to achieve an impressively cohesive result of the work in which music and images become an inseparable whole aimed at being a magnificent portrait of human life in this world.
Perhaps a rather boring preamble but necessary to understand what the Catanese audience faced in the splendid setting of the Teatro Massimo Bellini. A show of exceptional emotional intensity: where the harmony of human figures working in the fields or at sea, whose profiles seemed to establish perfect balance, was contrasted with the frenetic hustle and bustle of cities, impersonal and detached human conglomerates where contact with nature has been broken.
Where gorgeous human geographies resulting from the integration of man into natural contexts were juxtaposed with colossal cement, systems of skyscrapers, impressive for their cruel and geometric reality. It is a whirlwind of image-music that leaves no room for boredom and is never an end in itself. A "film" that, thanks to particular cinematic techniques, to meticulously crafted photography, to a soundtrack hyper-contextualized within the film itself, manages to engage the audience who appreciates and thanks.
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