Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Milan, May 23 2019 – The exhibition “Lelli and Masotti. Musiche”, an exhibition project promoted and produced by the Municipality of Milan – Culture and Palazzo Reale with the two artist photographers Silvia Lelli and Roberto Masotti for the evocative spaces of the Appartamento dei Principi on the first floor of Palazzo Reale. The exhibition, which is part of the PhotoWeek schedule, will remain open to the public free of charge until June 23, 2019. 
The exhibition is a kaleidoscopic narrative through images, created by Silvia Lelli and Roberto Masotti in Italy and abroad since the early Seventies, which together draw a transversal portrait of live music: from classical to jazz, from opera to rock, up to research and experimental music. For a long time the official photographers of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Silvia Lelli and Roberto Masotti have turned a careful eye to musical performance since their inception, capturing in their shots the expressive intensity and strength of the gesture expressed on stage. 
The exhibition itinerary includes 110 black and white images accompanied by a video creation constructed from the photographs on display and other materials from the artists' archives (editing by Gianluca Lo Presti/MammaFotogramma; sound collage by Massimo Falascone).
In their decades-long research, Lelli and Masotti have built a visual archive on the performing arts that is among the richest and most culturally important in the world. The photographs selected for MUSICHE give life to a journey in which composers, performers, conductors, singers, but also entire orchestras, scenes and instruments belonging to very different musical and artistic universes meet side by side. Along the exhibition itinerary you can see Demetrio Stratos and Riccardo Muti, Miles Davis and Pina Bausch, Maurizio Pollini and Astor Piazzolla in action… 
“No more high and low music – say Lelli and Masotti – serious or light or heavy, but the active co-presence of different experiences in the musical landscape that lives around us. There is no desire for cataloguing, list, taxonomy; there is a series that is composed and broken down, a personal and evocative journey that recalls inexorably fixed moments."
The curator Marco Pierini explains: “It is because they are simultaneously observers and listeners that Silvia Lelli and Roberto Masotti immersively experience the spatio-temporal condition of live music and return it in images that act in us as catalysts of a collective memory that transforms personal events , intimate, in shared and universal feelings".
The exhibition fully demonstrates the extreme variety of live music, investigated both in rehearsal and in concert with a highly personal and engaging poetic approach: in over fifty years of activity Lelli and Masotti have reinterpreted the Milanese, Italian and international scene, documenting the history of the show with photographs that fully convey the vibrations of the stage.
“Musiche” is accompanied by a catalog published by Silvana Editoriale which combines the images on display with writings by Lelli and Masotti, by Marco Pierini, curator of the exhibition and art historian, and by Carlo Serra, philosopher and professor at the University of Calabria.
Recently the immense photographic archive of Lelli and Masotti, which includes more than 400.000 images, was recognized as being of particular historical interest with a provision from the Ministry of Cultural Heritage.