YUVAL AVITAL

“An allegorical opera that starts from the biblical text to face the contemporary topic of the fight between Good and Evil”.

Yuval’s “Giobbe” (Job) is an artistically fascinating and profoundly impressive message of the music-theatrical against increasing right-wing populism and anti-Semitic defamation worldwide. It is a reminder against forgetting and indifference, but it also offers hope, as did its Old Testament model”.

“A visionary score that whirls together voices, sounds and images in an ancient biblical text, a classical performers cast of excellence, ancestral notes of traditional religious cantors linked with a powerful video-art creation. All this is JOB, the new icon-sonic opera by Israeli composer Yuval Avital that sets in the scenographic context of Rome’s Terme di Diocleziano from May 30 to June 1”.

“Job makes us reflect on the fragility of fortune and on the need to open ourselves to the other, to keep in mind that we, born under a lucky star, can at any moment find ourselves on the other side, forced to flee, in need of help, strangers. Job requires us to put ourselves in the other’s shoes, it tells us without compromises that the future is not in our hands and that the needy people of today could be replaced by our son or brother tomorrow”.

“Though an advertisement in the local newspaper and open calls, Avital involved more than 350 people: Jew’s harp players, women transformed to Venuses, butchers, dancers, poets, farmers, musicians, to realize a vast polyptych of four parallel projections that suck the visitor/traveler into the atmosphere - mystic and carnal - of Etna”.

“The breath of the Mountain. For those born and raised in close contact with Etna, its discreet but present breath is something present in everyday life, tangible, familiar. For the rest of the world it is a volcano. But for its children its ‘a Muntagna’ - a female, a mother, a woman, an energy. Pure. Throbbing. Vibrant. From these vibrations, from her breath, music is born. An «Harmonic tremor» which the artist / musician Yuval Avital had captured, than giving it the widest form of freedom: sharing it with others”.

“Variations on Harmonic tremor is a journey both individual as choral, where Yuval Avital crosses between music, words, images, dances, daily life to tell of his experience with the volcano. A collective journey since the ‘harmonic tremor’ is above all human: in an almost one-year of work the artist had involved more than 300 people between the towns and villages of Etna, including artists, farmers, dancers, musicians, entire families, elders, teenagers, women transformed with a strong presence into ‘Venuses’ (…) it is a contemporary artwork recreating an emotive oneiric journey, almost mystical inside the magma of the images of our volcano, in which it is also beautiful to disappear, to let it pull you inside it, in the middle of dark woods in the night while they are washed by a cascade of numerical matrix”.

"Avital's Fuga Perpetua is Ethical art (...)The show layers powerful music with filmed refugees and forces the audience to get in contact for an hour, with the face of human suffering in our enlightened century.Among the dozens of works performed this time at the Festival of Israeli Music, "Fuga Perpetua"  by  composer and video artist Yuval Avital, a 40-year-old Israeli living in Milan, was presented as a particularly intriguing show. Bottom Line: Expectations have come true." 

"Taking inspiration from the futurist concerts, [Open Fence] inaugurates the biggest sound sculpture ever realized in Italy, opera by the artist Yuval Avital, in which the public will be able to play next to professional musicians." 

"I remember when I was a nasty kid stomping sticks on neighbors fences. I was nasty and noisy but the multimedia artist and composer Yuval Avital (I bet he did what I did when he was a child) transformed a noisy game into a poetic sound sculpture: Open Fence." Barbara Musso