An immersive show combining painting, music, and video art

A multimedia performance for piano, live electronics, and video.
An artistic installation drawn from a pictorial cycle by the artist, based on musical works.

The project originates from the artistic practice of Castoldi as both a pianist and a painter. For several years, Amalia has been developing a personal artistic research focused on translating a piano piece—either an existing work by well-known composers or by living composers—into a painting. This research was the subject of her undergraduate thesis, and she has already presented concerts based on this approach. For this performance, the artist selected a musical program of six pieces, creating one painting for each work. To present this project to the public as a concert-performance, the paintings are reworked into video and projected during the live performance of each piece. Since video is added to the music, the original works are also reworked in collaboration with composer Francesco Rota, who composed an electronic layer to be combined with the original piano pieces. The exhibition of Castoldi’s paintings completes the experience: the works are displayed in a separate space that the audience visits after the concert, creating an interactive and innovative journey for listening to and experiencing classical and contemporary music through a multidisciplinary and immersive approach.

This work expands the interpretation of existing musical pieces by offering the audience a visual way to understand the music.

Amalia Castoldi – Piano
Francesco Rota – Live electronics

Paintings and sculptures by Amalia Castoldi.
Reworking of the musical pieces by Castoldi / Rota (audio: Rota; video: Castoldi / Rota).

Duration: 45 min

Previous representation:
28 Novembre 2025 – San’Andrea theatre, Bergamo (Italia). Entropia 2025, Lester Foundation.

Op. 8 n. 28
2024-2025. Video, 2-channel tape, music for piano, oil on canvas, cotton threads, nails. 100 x 80 cm.
La Cathedrale Engloutie
Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918), Preludio X Book I – Reworked by Castoldi/Rota

Op. 6 n. 8
2021-2025. Video, 2-channel tape, music for piano, oil on canvas. 100 x 100 cm.
4’ 33” (1952)
John Cage (1912 – 1992) – Reworked by Castoldi/Rota

Op. 8 n. 31
2025. Video, 2-channel tape, music for piano, oil on canvas. 50 x 40 cm.
Darknesse visible (1997)
Thomas Adès (b. 1971) – Reworked by Castoldi/Rota

Program:

Op. 8 n. 32
2025. Video, 2-channel tape, music for piano, oil on canvas. 60 x 50 cm.
Unus Mundus (2017)
Ingrid Stölzel (b. 1971) – Reworked by Castoldi/Rota


Op. 8 n. 33
2025. Video, 2-channel tape, music for piano, oil on canvas. 60 x 80 cm.
Montagne Déchireé – ce qu'a vu le Monsieur Croche (2006)
Manfred Trojahn (b. 1949), Douze Preludes No. 2 – Reworked by Castoldi/Rota

Below are video excerpts from the performance.
Due to the presence of projected videos in addition to the piano performance, the music was recorded separately in another location and then edited onto the video, so that the work could be presented clearly.

Op. 8 No. 31
2025. Video, 2-channel tape, music for piano, oil on canvas 60 x 50 cm.

Darknesse visible (1997)
Thomas Adès (b. 1971) – Reworked by Amalia Castoldi/ Francesco Rota

Darkness Visible is based on a contemporary piano piece by Thomas Adès, itself a re-composition of music by John Dowland. Dowland’s original work contains a deeply dark, almost horror-inflected poetic imagery, which remains largely concealed in the musical surface due to the performance practices of its time. Adès’ reworking introduces a subtle tremor that gradually stretches the musical tension, keeping it constantly on the verge of emergence. The intermedial reworking by the artist and Francesco Rota does not alter this structure but offers a perceptual key to it: through video, form and sound, the work explores the act of glimpsing one’s own inner sensations within darkness, as they intermittently take shape and are revealed by an unstable, discontinuous light, comparable to that of a candle

Op. 8 No. 31
2025. Video, 2-channel tape, music for piano, oil on canvas 60 x 50 cm.

Unus Mundus (2017)
Ingrid Stölzel (b. 1971) – Reworked by Castoldi/Rota

The musical source of Unus Mundus is a contemporary piano work by Ingrid Stölzel, described by the composer as an emotional landscape and structurally conceived as a circular form, in which the ending returns to the beginning. In her notes, Stölzel refers to the concept of yin and yang as a generative principle. The reworking by the artist and composer Francesco Rota expands this idea into an intermedial investigation: yin and yang are treated as two complementary modes of being rather than as specific emotions. In the video, they appear as alternating phases of the same place— thinking of Silent Hill—while in the painted image they coexist simultaneously, forming a unified space (unus) where opposites are held together rather than resolved

Op. 8 No. 33
2025. Video, 2-channel tape, music for piano, video art.

Montagne Déchireé – ce qu'a vu le Monsieur Croche (2006)
Manfred Trojahn (b. 1949), Douze Preludes No. 2 – Reworked by Amalia Castoldi/Francesco Rota

Montagne Déchirée originates from a piano work by Manfred Trojahn, subtitled “What Mr. Crooked Saw.” The piece alternates a strongly agitated and dramatic character with a third theme marked by the composer as “dreaming,” softer and more suspended. The title recalls a figure used in a horror film as the name of a possessed toy. In the reworking by the artist and Francesco Rota, the musical form is reinterpreted as a radical dilation of a single instant: from the opening to the final arpeggio preceding the last six measures—where a varied reprise of the third theme appears in a slow tempo—the entire work unfolds within the moment immediately before an act of self-harm. Within this compressed temporal space, two primary emotional forces are condensed and collide. “Mr. Crooked” becomes an ambiguous humanoid figure, simultaneously a personification of inner agitation and a manifestation of the insistent, destructive impulse—the proverbial “devil on the shoulder”—that pushes toward harmful action