“This glorious juxtaposition of the tradition and pageantry in our wonderful Mediterranean Island, with the poignancy and reflection of this capsule within the liturgical year.
This inexplicable duality – the dichotomy of the Christian religion – wherein Christ’s triumphant magnificence is achieved through His Passion.
The resplendence of everything around us on Easter and the darkness preceding this on Good Friday.
The Three Palaces is always about contrast: of old and new, or the marriage of space and experience,” explains Dr Michelle Castelletti, Curator/Artistic Director of the Three Palaces Festival.
For the past ten years The Three Palaces festival has been an autumn event, a festival of ten days or two weeks around the first two weeks of November, with performances set in historically important and magnificent buildings.
“This year, however, we have decided to give our followers a Spring edition (April 11-13) – a weekend of celebration and reflection and there is surely no other weekend would be more appropriate than that of the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, much-loved by all Maltese, and the celebration of Palm Sunday,” adds Michelle.
“This is a time when everyone comes together – be this through unwavering pride of their town or village decorating the streets, forming spectacular processions, and singing their hearts out in church, religious devotion, or a weekend for festivity. In these three days, I wanted to encapsulate this – firstly through the tenderness, tragedy, and pathos of the Pieta’, with a newly-commissioned dance which I asked to be choreographed to Pergolesi’s supplicant Stabat Mater.”
This premiere performance was inspired by sacred imagery, including echoes of the Pietà or Our Lady of Pity, a marble sculpture of Jesus and Mary at Mount Golgotha representing the “Sixth Sorrow” of the Virgin Mary by Michelangelo Buonarroti, a key Italian Renaissance work which stands in Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City.
“The piece weaves together the deeply personal and the profoundly universal,” continues Michelle. “Moveo Dance Company brings to life the shifting landscapes of grief, loss, and love through the movement of four performers, each navigating their own path while converging in moments of shared pain and resilience. Fluid and abstract, the choreography follows the emotional currents of the music, allowing its narrative to unfold through the body. Rather than telling a story, it creates a space where performers and audience alike can experience, reflect, and interpret the depth of emotion within the music.”
This is followed by the drama of the last minutes of Christ on the Cross, for which Michelle has curated a site-specific, interdisciplinary, immersive, and participatory performance at St John’s Co-Cathedral. This takes the form of a “promenade” quasi-installation type performance with words and music at around that most harrowing yet poignant time in the Christian Liturgy, through the music and art that has been created over centuries to reflect this.
“We invite the audience to experience the splendour of St John’s Co-Cathedral in a way they have never done before. The glorious marbled floor of the cathedral will be exposed, revealing the Latin epitaphs inscribed on the tombstones, the symbolism and metaphors for death and afterlife, the elaborate coats of arms. We enter to the sound of the king of instruments with Haydn’s Terremoto (Earthquake) and are led through one experience after the other, encapsulating the different emotions of the last moments of the Passion of Christ on the cross. There will be moments of tenderness, moments of angst, moments of transcendental beauty and moments of surprise. All senses will be engaged in this unique promenade, immersive and interactive experience, in our most magnificent cathedral – scents, lights, movement, sound, words, imagery – entwined with tradition and restrained, but noble, spectacle.”
The music will include excerpts from Haydn’s Seven Last Words, Mozart’s Requiem, Gounod’s Les Sept Paroles de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ sur la crois, Verdi’s Requiem, new works inspired by the visionary and mystic, Hildegard von Bingen, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Albinoni’s Stabat Mater.
On either side of this extraordinary programme, festival goers are invited to enjoy a spectacular daytime feast of flag-throwers and trumpeters in the streets of both Malta’s old and new capitals, Valletta & Mdina, “a continuation of contrasts, of exuberance, of spectacle, of splendour, of thought.”
Gruppo Sbandieratori e Tamburini di Montepulciano, united by their passion for the historical discipline of the flag and the drum, will perform at both city gates at 1 am and 2pm on April 12 and 13. The drums are made of wooden barrels, hemp rope and synthetic leather, and the flags, each of which weighs 1.2 kg with a wooden shaft and lead counterweight, are resplendent with the Griffin, the group’s coat of arms and the symbol of Montepulciano.
With nine velvet-clad flag throwers, five trumpeters and seven drummers, this promises to be a striking way which to commemorating Jesus Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
