The Grenchus Foundation @ Piers Faccini - Video #3 @ Atrium 360 - David Rubenstein Hall

2022 SPRING ARTS SEASON:

Piers Faccini @ France Rocks Festival ~ Video #3 @ Atrium 360 David Rubenstein Hall ~ Lincoln Center (2018)

The Grenchus Foundation @ Piers Faccini -@ Atrium 360 - David Rubenstein Hall

( A special little clip…)

Atrium 360°

Special Tribute to Lincoln Center & 360 David Rubenstein Atrium

Given we are still in the middle of a pandemic, we will be releasing some of our recorded pieces from the past, that we have never released before! While Atrium 360 ~ David Rubenstein Hall is still closed we will be sharing some of the performances we experienced and enjoyed there …

Enjoy!

The English-born, France-based singer-songwriter Piers Faccini, who creates “captivating, quietly insistent” music (Wall Street Journal) in the vein of Nick Drake infused with a global outlook, brings his newest project to the Atrium as part of the France Rocks Festival. Inspired by the rich medieval history of his Mediterranean surroundings, I Dreamed an Island is a fascinating collection of songs drawing on Western, Arabic, and Byzantine influences. Imagining how a Provençal madrigal might sound closer to the mode of an Arabic makan, or how words in English could be put to melodies sung with microtones of a Turkish taqsim, Faccini crosses folk and world music genres, transforming John Martyn into Ali Farka Touré, Pentangle into a Tunisian wedding band, and a Sicilian ciaccona into a Tuareg desert riff….

I Dreamed An Island is a personal quest for Piers Faccini and the album describes his voyage towards an imagined haven through the storms of fear and intolerance currently brewing around the world. Sung mostly in English but in French, Italian dialects and Arabic, too, the album is an impassioned celebration of cultural diversity and pluralism. Searching for a bygone golden era when coexistence and religious tolerance once prevailed, Faccini found a model for his utopian haven in 12th Century Sicily. At the crossroads of Western, Arabic and Byzantine influence, the island briefly flourished as the most enlightened and advanced society in medieval Europe.

Faccini’s latest compositions depict the unique moment of creative cohabitation between peoples and faiths. Inspired by traditions centuries old — but firmly 21st century in its blending of languages, narratives and instrumental arrangements — electric guitars converse across time with a Baroque viola d’amore, while an oud answers a medieval psaltery and a Moroccan guembri pulses trance-like to the drums.

Presented in collaboration with The Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Bureau Export, and the France Rocks Festival

original release of “I Dreamed of An Island” album

original press release by Lincoln Center

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