Teatro Annibale Maria di Francia | Antonio Galeano

The Theater is a dynamic acoustic room annexed to the Mother House of the Institute of the Daughters of Divine Zelo in Messina, a work commissioned to Antonio Galeano on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Holy Father Annibale Maria di Francia, founder of the Rogationist Order. The inauguration took place with a concert by Uto Ughi on May 9, 2003.

The Theater, entirely in an olive soundbox, hosts 328 seats divided between stalls and grandstands. The opera was the first dynamic acoustic hall ever built, and also the first specialized space for contemporary music in southern Italy.

It is a theater that can be tuned, thanks to the system of rotating prisms, equipped with three phono reflecting faces, and to the ceiling for equalization of the sound energy in the room. The acoustic prism system was applied to the side walls of the theater stalls. The modification of the faces of the prisms, facing the incident front of the sound wave, is able to modify the reverb tail of the room, making it a tunable space like a musical instrument. In this theater, the three faces of the prisms were designed in solid olive wood, in extruded aluminum with integrated Impruneta terracotta and in micro fabric on the mat.
The solid olive tree allows a medium reflection of the incident sound energy, the aluminum allows a high reflection of the incident sound wave, while the micro fabric can be classified as a sound absorbing system. Each of the 98 prisms making up the walls of the stalls can be rotated independently of the others and this therefore allows for walls with differentiated acoustic response zones. The hall reverb tail (for frequencies at 500 Hz) has a range between 1 and 1.6 seconds.
The performances related to the room acoustics, able to change the sound reverb tail and timbre according to each type of listening, make the room suitable for any live musical and theatrical performance, in non-amplified or amplified mode, from prose , to solo music, to chamber and symphonic music. The space was inaugurated by Uto Ughi in 2003, while the first audition of Sala acoustics took place in the presence of the engineering students (of the Messina Faculty) of the course of Professor Raffaella Lione in 2002, with musical performance on the tenor saxophone by Alfredo Restuccia.
The space met with the applause of many musicians who performed in this theater, the performers in fact were able to choose the acoustic configuration of the hall according to the musical repertoire performed. Over the years in this theater have played among others: Uto Ughi, Francois Joel Thiollier, Michele Campanella, Alessandro Specchi, Anne Ducros, Billy Cobham, Stanley Jordan, Francesco Cafiso, Bruno Lauzi.