Before the first note is played to open the Pierre Boulez Saal’s new season, the hall is silent for two months. Between the old and the new season, there are no concerts and no music is heard. Instead, with late and enlivened summer evenings, the sound of the surrounding city grows bigger. The silent period may only last for a couple of weeks—yet it allows the hall and its audience to take a deep breath, to consciously take in the quiet and to reflect on what usually is at the center of attention here: organized, meaningful, collectively experienced sound—music.
The Gold Projections by American artist Joe Ramirez, an installation the Pierre Boulez Saal is home to on five weekends this August from sundown to 1 am, work their meditative spell in the silent space. Two massive golden disks, facing each other across the elliptical room, blend painting and the moving image in a fascinating visual and sensorial experience: when day turns into night, the gilded surface of Ramirez’s hand-crafted disks comes to magical life through high-resolution projections, reflecting visions, dreams, and memories.
I suppose it is the submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer." W.G. Sebald – The Rings of Saturn