Built in 1827 from a design by Pietro Ghinelli, neoclassical in style, with a typical horseshoe shaped room and four seating sectors, Le Muse theatre in Ancona is to reopen on 13th October of this year as a new piece of architecture with a history brimming with evocative juxtapositions. Maestro Riccardo Muti will be conducting the inauguration concert.
With the addition of two reinforced concrete pillars, a project dating back to the Nineteen Seventies blotted out the original image of Le Muse and permanently separated the external theatre casing from its dull interior architecture. From here in, the new design by the two architects Danilo Guerri and Paola Salmoni "restored" a complementary rapport between the modern interior and the neoclassical façades, preserving as much as they could (the entrance staircase, the original lobby) and creating a certain degree of continuity with the external urban setting, where emphasis was placed on the most public places in the theatre (lobby, foyer, reception rooms). The result is a theatre-plaza featuring materials that recapture the nomadic and temporary spirit inherent of a "performance" (wood and metal, trellises and galleries) as well as the spirit of the urban monument (bricks and stones, rhetorical shapes and collective meanings).
With its rehearsal rooms, reception rooms and acoustics researched in Tokyo and Bologna, Le Muse theatre is the biggest in the Marche, a special region as far as theatres are concerned, housing 78 theatres currently in use (and another forty to be reopened) for a population of a million and a half inhabitants. The new Le Muse Theatre is one of the most modern cutting-edge playhouses in central Italy.
With over a thousand seats, Le Muse theatre is fitted with a fireproof curtain in accordance with legal requirements, handmade by an artist, the first in Europe. In styling the curtain, the sculptor Valeriano Trubbiani imagined the enormous rolling shutter that closes the 360 square metre stage in to be like the side of an ancient ship thick with steel planking featuring a figurehead shining with bronze alto-rilievos sculptured into a black background. An auspicious sun laughs in the midst of a kind of baroque triumph with four metopes, Trajan's Arch and a curious little horse that seems to want to escape from a monstrance in a sacred portrayal.
