About
As Italo Calvino depicted his Invisible Cities as experiences, memories and desires rather than real places, the centenary of the writer’s birth provides the Ravenna Festival’s 34th edition with a chance to reflect on the twofold nature of the city as a symbol of both the community and its crises.
Following the double opening on 7 and 8 June, featuring respectively Laurie Anderson and Martha Argerich flanked by Mischa Maisky, the Festival’s narrative unfolds until 23 July. From 15 to 20 December, Riccardo Muti – who will have been on the podium of his Cherubini Orchestra for The Roads of Friendship and a concert with Tamás Varga – conducts a triptych consisting of a Verdi gala and two operas from the Italian repertoire. Foremost in the constellation of soloists of the summer programme are Anne-Sophie Mutter, Leōnidas Kavakos, Yefim Bronfman and Beatrice Rana.
The latter plays Rachmaninov for an evening with ballet stars (the dance programme also includes the world premiere of WE, the EYES by Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten). Titles that portray the dark side of civilisation are contrasted with a celebration of dialogue between cultures and genres: from the pacifism of Aristophanes’s Acarnesi to Frank Zappa’s Yellow Shark and Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs. Among the guest artists: Stefano Bollani, Aurora, The Tallis Scholars, Tenebrae Choir, The King’s Singers, Sinfonia Varsovia, Eleonora Abbagnato, Sergio Bernal, Fatoumata Diawara, Mike Stern…
About the Ravenna Festival
The Ravenna Festival is a summer festival of opera and classical music (as well as dance, jazz, ethnic, musical theater, ballett, sacred music, electronic music, drama, film, plus conventions and exhibitions) held in the city of Ravenna, Italy and the surrounding area each June and July.
Founded in 1990 by Cristina Mazzavillani Muti, Ravenna Festival has always been characterized by an artistic programme including all types of performing arts: symphonic and chamber music, opera, drama, dance, ballet, musical theatre, jazz, and ethnic music. Every year from May to July, the entire city becomes a stage for two months: its staggering gilded basilicas, encrusted with ancient mosaics, its elegant historical theatres, its cloisters, ancient buildings, the industrial heritage sites, but also its beaches and its pine forest, where Dante was hosted, and further off, the gently rolling hills peeping from the distant horizon…
These extraordinary places – it is worth remembering here that 8 monuments in Ravenna are UNESCO World Heritage sites – and a multidisciplinary vocation are the distinctive features that make the Ravenna Festival unique and contribute to rediscover a city which used to be a crossroad of peoples and cultures. The Artistic Direction yearly defines a rich programme centred on a culturally and artistically relevant theme.
Many topics have already been dealt with and thoroughly examined: from the most specifically musical themes of the very beginnings (“Salieri and the Vienna School” in 1990, “Around Rossini”, “Bellini and Wagner”, etc.) to the more visionary ones, which projected Ravenna – a subject and an object at one and the same time – into new soulscapes: the Mediterranean, the East, the Apocalypse, visions, deserts and pilgrimages, in a mix of popular and fairy tale, sacred and profane…down to the history of the twentieth century. Over the years the Festival has dealt with crucial events such as the First World War or the Russian Revolution, and paid homage to icons such as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, or Dante Alighieri.
Since 1997, the year of the first historic concert in Sarajevo, the route of the Ravenna Festival has been closely intertwined with “The Roads of Friendship”, a series of lay pilgrimages touching on cities wounded by war, re-establishing ancient ties to places that have made history and building “bridges of brotherhood”. Leading on these paths as a cultural ambassador to the world is Riccardo Muti, with orchestras and choirs that, in line with the spirit of brotherhood that animates these concerts and in the name of the universality of music, have regularly welcomed some local musicians and given life to unforgettable events in such symbolic sites as Beirut, Jerusalem, Moscow, Yerevan, Istanbul, New York, Cairo, Damascus, Nairobi, Mirandola, Redipuglia, Otranto, Tokyo, Tehran, Kyiv, and Athens.
