Lux Aeterna

Two purely religious music pieces from the present and the past will be performed by renowned soloists and distinguished scholars of the Onassis Foundation in the Easter concert at the Upper Stage of the Onassis Stegi.

The concert will open with Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s swan-song, “Stabat Mater” [“Stabat mater dolorosa...”, 1736], based on the homonymous Roman Catholic hymn, and will conclude with the daintily minimal “Lux Aeterna” [The eternal light, 2007], by Nestor Taylor, which is in fact the celebrated Latin text of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, “Missa pro defunctis” [the Mass for the dead], put to music by the composer in memory of his mother.

The baroque aesthetics of the expressive purity, the spiritual lucidity and the religious transcendence is musically echoed in an interaction between the two works which, however stylistically different they may be, address both the notions of death and immortality, of memory and oblivion, of loss and hope. Mother Mary’s ineffable grief before the Cross for the demise of her child, the sanctified agony for his suffering and his holy sacrifice for the redemption of our souls expressed in Pergolesi’s work are conveyed in Taylor’s work through the story of a “fair soul”, an earthly angel who, after the ultimate valediction, returns lucid and cleansed in a promising resurrection.

Visual artist Thodoros Zafiropoulos has undertaken to link these two works by means of visual material; a succession of videos and slideshows projected on a giant screen. The material projected is drawn from the artist’s recent work entitled “Intake”, which was presented in 2011 at the Hellenic American Union and the Elika Gallery in Athens.
“What exists is what my eyes shine light upon, and what they don’t does not exist.”

Dancer and choreographer Apostolia Papadamaki creates a structured impromptu solo performance based on “Lux Aeterna”, commencing from a moment in an individual’s life in the present when his perishable physical body undergoes a series of transformations retreating into the collective memory to embrace the spirit…