It was with some foresight back in the 1970s that the town fathers of this tranquil village decided to build a state-of-the-art concert hall and art gallery here in the middle of the Dolomites. 
For one thing, the concert hall has helped attract paying summer tourists to a place best-known for its ski slopes, hiking trails and wood carvings. 
Now the art gallery is doing its part: These days, painting and music have come together under one roof, as the French-born artist Michel Le Goff exhibits his musical-inspired paintings at Ortisei for the duration of the town’s annual classical music festival. 
Le Goff’s lyrical canvases hang in a modern exhibition space reminiscent of the cool art venues of Milan and Paris. There is a work of art corresponding to each of the 23 pieces of music on this year’s program with a few additional paintings bearing more abstract titles such as “Single Note” or “Diminuendo”, a huge canvas extravagantly covered in 23 Karat gold leaf.
A series of seven large acrylic paintings rendered in different shades of yellow are dedicated to the eerily beautiful music of Scottish based composer Sally Beamish and are called “The Imagined Sound of Sun on Stone”.
Iconomusica, as the exhibit is called, is a fusion of the words icons and musica, a neologism devised by the artist that literally means “images of music”.
The process involves the artist immersing himself in the music as he simultaneously traces his brush over the canvas. The frenetic struggle between Death and the Maiden a composed by Schubert and adapted for string orchestra by Mahler, becomes a screech of red veins across the canvas that seem to pulsate with life but are held down by a thicker web of pale cold blue, the dark pathos of D minor. This contrast in the colors corresponds to the tonal contrast in the music and Death and the Maiden’s ekphrasis of emotional conflict.
Rather than trying to codify music into color and line, Le Goff offers a multi-layered impression of what he hears and the paintings reflect the mood inflicted on him by the music. Mozart generally elates him whereas Wagner or Beethoven depresses him, which is explicit on the canvas.
The artist explained, “It seems to have been the prerogative of composers to inspire themselves from visual art. Franz Liszt shows us Orcagna: Il trionfo della morte, Mussorgsky takes us to “Pictures at an Exhibition”, Sergei Rachmaninoff, described Arnold Bocklin’s Isle of the Dead. The list goes on. All of these musicians tried to capture with sounds the essence of visual sensation embedded in paintings. 
“With Iconomusica I reverse the process. Abstract art is the ideal medium to visualize the fugitive response the listener feels whilst listening to the works of great composers. Musical sound is in essence unsubstantial. It flies away through the air. By capturing on canvas the essence of a musical composition, I have given a visual permanency to musical lines which have struck the chord of my auditive emotion.”

The exhibition is a big publicity coup for the festival, as visitors to the gallery have already started asking where they can buy tickets for the concerts. Situated in the main street of Ortisei next to the tourist office, there has been a steady flow of visitors to the exhibition since it opened its doors.
Reaction to the paintings has been mostly positive if mixed with an element of puzzlement, tourist office members said. Art like this has rarely been exhibited in the Val Gardena before.
Yet Ortisei is a wealthy, charming town and attracts Milanese and Torinese on weekends and thousands of Austrians and Germans form Munich, Salzburg and southern Tyrolia. Serious collectors who happened to be on vacation here have already descended upon the gallery.
Credit for finding an artist whose work interprets classical music on canvas goes to the FestiValGardena’s artistic director, Clive Britton. This English pianist who will be performing works throughout the festival in Ortisei by Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler, Walton, Beethoven and Brahms has been involved with the festival for the past five years.
Beamish’s concerto “The Day Dawn” had its Italian premiere on July 13, when it opened the festival with the acclaimed British cellist Robert Cohen conducting the Orchestra del Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana. On the playbill for tonight is Schubert’s quintet for piano and strings, “The Trout” and Bruckner’s Symphony No.7 in E Major. Friday night will include compositions by Saint-Saens, Schumann and Beethoven. The calendar continues until Aug. 4 with Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi, Handel and Brahms.
The aim of the concert series is to make classical music more open and accessible to the public, Britton said. 
“There are two fundamental principles on which it is based,” he explained. “Opening a window on the whole process of making music, allowing the public to witness daily rehearsals in which young concert artists meet and work alongside musicians who represent some of the most important performance traditions to be found in the world today.”
Britton is married to the Florentine pianist Katja Fossi Todorow whose family has had a Bauhaus designed retreat in the Val Gardena since the 1930’s. It was in Florence that Britton and Todorow met Le Goff. The artist has a studio in Florence and has just finished a major one man show at the Santo Ficara gallery there.
The important thing for Le Goff, he said, is that his art and the music that inspired it are finally brought together within the same venue, where a true interaction can take place.