It’s difficult not to associate classical music with highbrow spaces. Tickets to see a symphony can be incredibly expensive, and often take place in a stuffy or buttoned-up concert hall.
These barriers prevent younger and more diverse audiences from engaging with classical music, limiting exposure to monumental works of art from the past.
With Pictures at an Exhibitions, Toronto artist Paula Arciniega is challenging these stereotypes, broadening the limits of how classical music is consumed and understood.
Taking place on April 12 in Regent Park in the Daniels Spectrum space, the event will feature the live rendition of an iconic composition by 19th century Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, performed by the Hannaford Street Silver Band. As the music plays, a series of large-scale paintings by Arciniega will rotate above the band, taking the audience on an immersive audio-visual journey.
“This has never been done before,” Arciniega tells The Grind, her voice unable to conceal her excitement. “We’ve got a 30-piece brass band and we’re expressing music through image and color.”
“Like, how rad is it to experience art in a different way like this?”
For more than 20 years, Arciniega has “obsessively pursued” the intersection of music and visual art.
A trained opera singer, her career path was forever altered after she visited an exhibit showcasing the works of modernist painter Marc Chagall.
“I immediately connected with that form of expression,” she says. “Experiencing grief or joy or ecstasy, but through color and shape.”
Basking in the freedom of this newfound creativity, she began painting symphonies and tone poems — a type of orchestral work that tells a story or evokes a narrative theme — building bridges between audio and visual media.
In 2008, Arciniega debuted The Mahler Project, a series of beautiful abstract paintings that sought to convey her emotional response to the music of the legendary Austrian Romantic composer Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911): “terror and tenderness, irony and innocence, private voice and public blaze held in the same breath.”
Unsurprisingly, her work struck a chord with musicians. She began collaborating with some, and dreaming of ways to share her creative ideas on a larger scale. After years of refining her craft, she set to work on her most ambitious project to date.
Modest Mussorgsky was one of the most prominent composers of the Russian Romantic period. Considered one of the “Mighty Five” of his time, he sought to create music inspired by his nation’s history and folklore.
In 1874, Mussorgsky penned Pictures at an Exhibition, a piano suite inspired by a series of works by his late friend, the architect and painter Viktor Hartmann (you can check out a performance of Mussorgsky’s suite by the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America at Carnegie Hall here). The composition is made up of 10 distinct movements, each based on Hartmann’s famous sketches, which depicted his travels across Europe.
Hartmann’s sketches, some of which have been lost, were “wonderfully narrative images,” Arciniega says, which Mussorgsky captured in his music.
“This piece has been begging for an exhibition of art,” she says.
About two years ago, Arciniega began working on a series of paintings with the goal of bringing Hartmann’s sketches back to life. “I wanted to re-invigorate them,” she says.
The result is a series of 15 vibrant and absorbing paintings: colourfully-dressed women shopping a bustling marketplace; a terrifying display of skulls and strewn bodies outside of a catacombs; a brightly modern rendering of a royal palace in Paris.
Paired with the Mussorgsky music that inspired these works, Arciniega believes that Pictures of an Exhibition will offer a compelling experience to not just classical connoisseurs, but to anyone who loves music.
“I think there’s a lack of exposure among youth to these monumental works,” she explains.
“But I believe so deeply that this music — classical, the post-romantic, the romantic — is so fundamental to the music that we are hearing now.”
She cites John Williams, the prolific composer behind some of Hollywood’s most famous scores (e.g. Star Wars, Jaws, Harry Potter), as a contemporary artist who is deeply influenced by classical music.
The exhibition, she points out, has a “storybook” quality to it that she believes will appeal to not only youth, but children too. “Kids easily connect with visual stimuli, and these images engage them in a way that I think will hold their focus,” she says. “It’ll imbue within them a deeper understanding of the art.”
Though it took years of planning and navigating red tape to pull it off, Arciniega is confident that the event has the power to inspire a new generation of music lovers, and to alter the way we approach musical education in Canada.
“Big picture, I just want to share how beautiful the shared human experience is,” she concludes. It’s a way for us to connect, to come together, to be reminded that we’re more than just the individual.”
Pictures at an Exhibition takes place one day only, Sunday, April 12 at 3 pm. Tickets are $51.75.