Yesterday the Richardson Olmsted Campus and the Buffalo Philharmonic jointly announced what should be a truly stunning spectacle of sight and sound. This summer a free outdoor concert will be held on the South Lawn of the Richardson Olmsted Campus. enLIGHTen will feature brilliant displays of color, images, and light that will trace the history of the Richardson, while reflecting the music being performed. The event will be held on Friday, July 28, 2017 at 9 p.m. and will feature works by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, Rachmaninoff.
This free event is open to the public as a special thank you to the community for its support. It’s also a community-wide celebration of the successful completion of the first phase of redevelopment at the Richardson Olmsted Campus. The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, led by JoAnn Falletta, along with local projectionist crew, PROJEX, will illuminate the night. All Western New Yorkers are invited to witness a “first” for this region.
A similar festival titled, LUMENOCITY, was held in Cincinnati for four consecutive years. Here’s a video from their 2015 program.
PROJEX will design the light show, under the artistic direction of Keith Harrington and in partnership with local artists and the Burchfield Penney Art Center. In what seems to be a new trend for the orchestra, the BPO in collaboration with PROJEX presented last weekend’s concert, “Wagner’s World of the Ring,” which brought together technology and classical music for a truly immersive multimedia experience.
For this program, PROJEX will use the latest light mapping technology to transform the historic Richardson with vivid visuals and lighting, while highlighting its architectural elements and the history of the Campus.
The 145-year-old Richardson Olmsted Campus is being renewed after years of neglect. Designed by one of America’s premier architects, Henry Hobson Richardson, in concert with the famed landscape team of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the building was completed in the late 1800s as the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane. Over the years, as mental health treatment changed and resources were diverted, the buildings and grounds began a slow deterioration.
enLIGHTen will feature music by famous composers who lived with mental illness and created astounding music, often finding healing properties in their work. An interesting paper, which provides some insight into this link was published in the Stanford Journal of Neuroscience titled “Mental Illness and Creativity: A Neurological View of the “Tortured Artist.”
This event is FREE and open to the public. More details to be announced on enlightenbuffalo.com. The BPO’s performance at this event is made possible in part through a Regional Economic Development Council Arts Implementation grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, with additional support from Iroquois Bar Corporation and National Grid.