WITH GREAT CAUTION
GIUSEPPE PENNISI reports on the
gradual reopening of Italian summer festivals
Gradually and with great caution, in Italy summer festivals are reopening. The Rome Opera House, the Ravenna Festival, the Verona Arena Festival and other institutions have outlined programs that are being considered by the Ministry of Culture to ensure that they are consistent with health protocols. We will give you the details as soon as ready.
Two quite different festivals are paving the road: a very well-known international festival, the Rossini Opera Festival (ROF), and a festival known in Italy mainly at the regional level in Sicily but which has brought its performances abroad and that in 2017 was awarded by the International Opera Award: the Festival of the Coro Lirico Siciliano.
The 2020 ROF will be held from 8 to 20 August. A new production, La cambiale di matrimonio, will be offered at the Rossini Theatre on 8, 11, 13, 17 and 20 August. The orchestra will play in the auditorium and the audience will watch the show from the 99 boxes. The opera will be conducted by the tenor Dmitry Korchak, making his debut as conductor at the ROF, leading the Rossini Symphony Orchestra. The cast is Carlo Lepore as Tobia Mill, Dilyara Idrisova as Fanny, Davide Giusti as Edoardo Milfort, Iurii Samoilov as Slook, Alexander Utkin as Norton and Martiniana Antonie. Laurence Dale will be responsible for the stage direction and Gary McCann for sets and costumes. The opera is in co-production with the Royal Opera House in Muscat, where it will be staged in January 2021. Along with La cambiale di matrimonio, Rossini's cantata Giovanna d'Arco, performed by Marianna Pizzolato, will also be proposed. The show will be streamed and screened in Piazza del Popolo, in line with the tradition for the ROF's final evening.
A 2013 Rossini Opera Festival concert in the Piazza del Popolo
After a history of major concerts - Marilyn Horne, Montserrat Caballé, June Anderson, Luciano Pavarotti - this year, Piazza del Popolo will be the venue for the opera I viaggio a Reims, scheduled for 12 and 15 August, in the production staged every year by Emilio Sagi as part of the activity of the Rossinian Academy 'Alberto Zedda'. The cast will be made up of ex-academicians who have already started an international career. Also in Piazza del Popolo, there will be six concerts held by some of the leading Rossinian performers of today: Olga Peretyatko on 9 August, Nicola Alaimo on 10 August, Jessica Pratt on 14 August, Juan Diego Flórez on 16 August, the trio of bassi buffi Alfonso Antoniozzi, Paolo Bordogna and Alessandro Corbelli on 18 August and Karine Deshayes on 19 August. The orchestra will be the Rossini Symphony Orchestra, led by young conductors such as Michele Spotti, Nikolas Naegele and Alessandro Bonato.
In a few years, the Coro Lirico Siciliano has established itself on the musical, theatrical, operatic and symphonic scene. Formed by artists from all over Sicily, it gives concerts, operas and other performances with great success, as judged by audiences and critics. It has also undertaken the intense work of research, enhancement and export of Sicilian music at both national and international levels, as well as rediscovering the most important Sicilian composers with the execution of lesser known or unpublished works. It has been awarded, among others, the Sicilian International Prize 'Il Paladino', the Belliniano Prize 2015, the Prize of the Academy of Fine Arts of Catania, the Ambassador of the Belcanto Award 2016 and in 2017 the International Opera Award. It has toured extensively in China and France. A feature of its festival is to operate in stone theaters - Taormina, Syracuse and Tindari, halfway between Messina and Palermo - very large Greco-Roman structures with excellent acoustics and where the necessary social distancing can be put in place.
Coro Lirico Siciliano. Photo © 2011 Domenick Gilberto
This year in Taormina and Tindari, La traviata, Cavalleria Rusticana and several concerts will be performed.
Copyright © 17 May 2020
Giuseppe Pennisi,
Rome, Italy
Update: Giuseppe Pennisi, 31 May 2020
The Italian summer of live music begins on 1 June 2020. In memory of the victims of COVID-19, at 6.45 pm, the Orchestra of Teatro dell'Opera di Roma and its music director Daniele Gatti are the protagonists of the Concert for the Republic Day - the most important national celebrations - in the gardens of the Quirinale Palace, in the presence of the Head of State Sergio Mattarella. Thanks to Rai Cultura, the evening will be broadcast live on Rai 1 and Radio 3. The Head of State, and some of his advisers, are likely to be the only live spectators. 'We are truly honored by this invitation and to be able to make the first live concert in Italy after the lockdown restrictions: an event dedicated to the memory of the victims of the coronavirus with a strong meaning of hope and rebirth for the world of music', says Superintendent Carlo Fuortes. Without the presence of the public, everything will take place in the strictest compliance with safety standards, including the distance between the professors in the orchestra. The musical program, for strings only, alternates Italian composers and European musical repertoire, great classics and pages that have marked the musical history of the twentieth century.
'The program reflects the tragedy from which we are coming out and looks with optimism to a more serene future' - says Daniele Gatti. 'They are short-lived songs, able to speak to the heart even if you are not in the best musical conditions'. It begins with the Adagio and Fuga K 546 composed by Mozart in 1788 and strongly influenced by Bach's contrapuntal style, and with Silouan's song, composed in 1991 by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and dedicated to the figure of the Orthodox monk known as Silvano del Monte Athos. The program includes the Vivaldi Concerto in E minor Op 3 No 11 for two violins, cello and strings. It includes the elegy Crisantemi, which Puccini wrote in 1890 in one night, for the death of Amedeo Ferdinand Mary of Savoy, King of Spain and first Duke of Aosta; and it includes Anton Webern's Langsamer Satz, written in 1905 with infinite nuances of feeling. The concert closes with the Aria from Bach's Suite No 3, BWV 1068, known as Air on the G string. Rome's Opera House also has plans for a new production of Rigoletto and a series of concerts, probably in the context of the Circus Maximus in July 2020.
A number of summer festivals have announced their revised programs to take into account precautions and rules on social distancing. For dates and booking tickets, it is suggested to visit to festival websites. Ravenna Festival opens on Sunday 21 June 2020 with a concert conducted by Riccardo Muti at the Rocca Brancaleone. In this historic outdoor space, the Luigi Cherubini Orchestra and soprano Rosa Feola will join Muti for the first concert with audience in Italy after the long silence imposed by the measures to contain the epidemic. It is an event of great symbolic importance - which will also be underlined by the presence of Cultures Minister Franceschini and the television coverage of RAI. The XXXI edition of the Ravenna Festival, re-created specifically for an unprecedented context, will continue until 30 July 2020 with about forty events at the Rocca.
The Macerata Opera Festival begins on 18 July with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don Giovanni conducted by Francesco Lanzillotta. The production is signed by stage director Davide Livermore. It is a co-production with the French Chorégies d'Orange Festival, where the Mozart masterpiece was staged in the summer of 2019. It will be rethought and reorganized for the spaces of the Sferisterio, also in light of the new safety regulations. In the title role, there will be Mattia Olivieri. Leporello will be Tommaso Barea, Donna Anna - Karen Gardeazabal, while Donna Elvira and Don Ottavio will be Valentina Mastrangelo and Giovanni Sala respectively, the two young singers 'adopted' artistically by the festival. The cast includes Alessandro Spina (Commander), Gaetano Triscari (Masetto) and Lavinia Bini (Zerlina). The performance will be staged on 18, 24, 26 and 31 July and 2 and 8 August 2020. Giuseppe Verdi's Il Trovatore (25 July and 1 August 2020) will be performed in concert form and Vincenzo Milletarì will take to the podium. The protagonists are some of the most interesting performers on the international scene: Luciano Ganci (Manrico), Roberta Mantegna (Leonora, making her debut after playing the French version at the Verdi festival in Parma), Sonia Ganassi (Azucena) and Massimo Cavalletti (The Count of Luna) and again Davide Giangregorio (Ferrando) and Fiammetta Tofoni (Ines).
The Valle d'Itria Festival in Martina Franca presents two titles by Richard Strauss: Ariadne auf Naxos (21, 24, 26 July and 2 August) entrusted to the baton of Fabio Luisi and proposed in a new Italian version of the libretto by Quirino Principe in semi-staged form according to the idea of conductor Walter Pagliaro; and Molière's play Le Bourgois Gentilhomme re-imagined as a monologue with the mise en espace curated by Davide Gasparro and Richard Strauss' stage music directed by Michele Spotti (14, 22, 25 July and 1 August 2020).
From 23 July until 2 August 2020, the Montepulciano Cantiere d'Arte will have as central events; a) the national premiere of the new production by Marco Tullio Giordana inspired by the famous epistolary between Ingeborg Bachmann and Hans Werner Henze; b) the Tuscan Orchestra conducted by Markus Stenz; c) Leslie Howard's performance, the only pianist in the world to have recorded Franz Liszt's opera omnia; and d) the premiere of Echi di Instanti, a concert that interprets social distance.
The Emilia Romagna Festival will take place from 26 July until mid-September. The festival will celebrate its twentieth anniversary. It features great composers of the past - Vivaldi, Bach, Rossini, Verdi and Beethoven - and contemporary composers who have written music for the festival - Morricone, Bacalov, Gubaidulina, Sollima, Nyman, Glass and Penderecki. Included will be pianist and composer Michael Nyman's Concerto No 2, written for Massimo Mercelli's flute and dedicated to his mutual friend Ezio Bosso, following his recent and untimely death. The festival will also be about two other great composers and musicians who have recently disappeared: Krzysztof Penderecki and Luis Bacalov.
The background image on this page is derived from a detail from an anonymous 2009 photo of a circa 1910 church stained glass window in Palermo.
