Fondazione Prada with Threes presents a live performance by American composer Laraaji, who playS his latest album, Sun Piano (2020). Organized by Threes in collaboration with Fondazione Prada, the concert will take place in the Church of Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa in Milan on Wednesday, 23 April 2025, at 8 pm.
The church’s interior, designed by Giovanni Muzio in 1932, houses since 1997 the site-specific light installation Untitled by American minimalist artist Dan Flavin, produced by Fondazione Prada in collaboration with the Dia Center for the Arts in New York and Dan Flavin Estate. Transformed by the chromatic sequence created by Flavin’s neon, the church’s spaces become an ideal stage for the performance by Edward Larry Gordon, aka Laraaji (Philadelphia, 1943), one of the most influential and charismatic Ambient and New Age musicians.
Sun Piano (2020) is the first album in a trilogy composed by Laraaji that, compared to his most famous jam sessions made with electronically modified kithara, marks his comeback to the piano, the first instrument he learned to play. Registered in a church in Brooklyn, Sun Piano includes improvised R&B, soul, and New Age tracks that create meditative and thoughtful music. The common feature of each composition is a recurring metaphor in the artist’s albums—the sun as a spiritual guide and a source of renovation.
As Laraaji states, “The piano is an instrument that gives voice to how I hold space for light… If you were sitting in the church, you’d look and see that there’s a man at the piano, someone playing a physical instrument. However, were you to close your eyes and let the piano coax, guide and escort the emotional imagination, there is a good chance that you would feel a lightness. A luminosity.”
“Sun Piano” is the fifth collaboration between Fondazione Prada and Threes to combine sonic experimentation with the spatial and visual research of Flavin’s site-specific intervention. Since 2017, the Church of Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa has hosted concerts and performances by well-known and up-and-coming artists, such as William Basinski (2017), Charlemagne Palestine (2018), Ellen Arkbro (2021), Arvö Part (2019), Maria Horn (2022), FUJI|||||||||||TA (2023), Marta De Pascalis (2024), and Tashi Wada with Julia Holter (2024). On 10 December 2025, American composer and organist Kali Malone will present a new live performance.