Marking the closing of the exhibition “Albrecht Dürer. 550th Anniversary of the Artist’s Birth”
On 27 March 2022, the exhibition “Albrecht Dürer. 550th Anniversary of the Artist’s Birth” ended its run with a concert given by the musicAeterna choir. The exhibition and special musical project around it were hold thanks to the support of the VTB Bank.
The concert took place on 27 March in the Field Marshals’ Hall of the Winter Palace. The programme contained works by younger contemporaries of the great Renaissance artist – composers belonging to the Franco-Flemish School of polyphonic music. Soloists and ensembles with varying membership performed masterpieces of religious and secular music written by Josquin des Prez, Claudin de Sermisy, Nicolas Gombert, King Henry VIII, John Taverner, John Dowland and others. This tribute to Dürer is a “bouquet” of works from the High Renaissance that reflect the most diverse aspects of the artist’s world of imagery: biblical motifs, allegorical compositions, realistic sketches and marvellous phantasmagorias.
The exhibition was a great success with visitors and several special projects were created around it. One of them was the “Musical Dimension” devised jointly by the State Hermitage and the musicAeterna orchestra on the initiative of the VTB Bank that acted as general sponsor for the exhibition. The conductor Teodor Currentzis and the residents of musicAeterna: the composers Alexei Retinsky and Andreas Moustoukis, musicAeterna’s conductor Feodor Lednev and chief choirmaster Vitaly Polonsky created original selections of musical works for several sections of the display that remain accessible on the website http://durer.musicaeterna.org. This project was accompanied by an educational programme that included a “Musical Dimension” podcast as well as lectures and round tables with the participation of the exhibition curators and other experts
Additionally, a large-scale project with the title “Dürer Chronicles” documented the process of creating the exhibition on video. Over an entire year, the various stages in the process of working on the upcoming display were recorded. Viewers were able to experience many of them along with the curators including a virtual visit to the museum’s storerooms and scientific laboratories, to find out how items are selected for an exhibition, restored and installed in the display. The exhibition curators, Natalia Sepman and Svetlana Murashkina, participated in the making of the film along with other members of the Hermitage staff. This project was implemented with the support of the VK Video platform. The video programmes remain accessible on the museum’s official page in the VKontakte social network, and also on the project’s own website – https://vk.com/durer_hermitagemuseum.