Donde hay música no puede haber cosa mala, or ‘where there is music there can be no evil’: these words from Don Quixote reflect the spirit of the Ravenna Festival, which has always found a space for confrontation and dialogue in music and the performing arts, but the title quotation of the Festival’s 36th edition also offers an opportunity to reflect on courage, from the classic epic to Cervantes’s knight-errant, up to today’s heroism: civil and spiritual courage, the courage to begin again, to create and hope. While Riccardo Muti opens the Festival on 31 May with his Cherubini Orchestra, the programme includes guests such as Zubin Mehta, Daniel Harding, Accademia Bizantina, The Tallis Scholars, Uri Caine, Cat Power, Heiner Goebbels, Max Richter, Enrico Rava, Lakecia Benjamin… Once again this year, Ravenna Festival boasts more than one hundred performances, with the involvement of more than a thousand artists, thanks to the support of the Ministry of Culture, the Emilia-Romagna Region and the Municipality of Ravenna, the main partner Eni and the sponsors.
Heroes for the New Millennium
If the Bhagavad Gita, the starting point for the Grande Teatro di Lido Adriano, revolves around warrior Arjuna, in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, the source of Handel’s main characters in the operas staged for the Autumn Trilogy, the paladins are men in the grip of passions. Teatro delle Albe/Ravenna Teatro’s Don Chisciotte ad ardere calls us to participate in the dream of the knight-errant, while Marco Baliani invites us to contemplate ‘silent courage’. Voices and Music from Palestine, in collaboration with the Festival delle Culture, features four concerts, while Romagna in fiore includes nine sustainable afternoon events to celebrate communities in the Romagna territories devastated by the floods. The women of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata are civil heroines on strike against the war; Marco Martinelli “brings back to life” this ancient comedy with teenagers from the Neapolitan area. The common thread of civil courage runs through the opera Anita about Garibaldi’s companion, Uri Caine’s The Passion of Octavius Catto dedicated to the African-American activist murdered in 1871, and the dance performance Fragolesangue. The courage to dare is also often decisive in the arts – think of Bob Dylan’s ‘electric choice’ with the concert ‘of the Royal Albert Hall’ in 1966 reproposed by Cat Power or Ennio Morricone’s relationship with cinema, explored in CNN/Aterballetto’s Notte Morricone.
Music, One and Manifold
Riccardo Muti is on the podium of his Cherubini Orchestra for the opening concert with violinist Giuseppe Gibboni and a second concert in July, but the symphonic section includes Zubin Mehta with the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and violinist Amira Abouzahra and Daniel Harding at the head of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Accademia Bizantina dedicates Vivaldi d’amore to the Red Priest’s concertos for strings, violin and viola d’amore with conductor and soloist Alessandro Tampieri. The contemporary music section features Max Richter with his most recent album In A Landscape and Heiner Goebbels’s Surrogate Cities – the composer will also curate the mise en espace of this impressive orchestral cycle in the new Ravenna Festival production. The Duo Aria pays tribute to Luciano Berio on the centenary of his birth, while the new generation of pianism is represented by Pietro Fresa and Alexander Gadjiev. Among the chamber music ensembles, eclectic vision string quartet from Berlin, Trio Orelon performing Haydn, Beethoven and Arensky, Signum Saxophone Quartet ranging from Grieg to Piazzolla, Marco Albonetti and the FontanaMix Ensemble for world music arranged by Fred Sturm, and Širom with its avant-garde folk. Gilberto Cappelli’s opera dedicated to Anita Garibaldi is staged at the Fattoria Guiccioli, where she died in 1849. The Zawinul Legacy Band 3.0 retraces the musical odyssey of the jazz fusion pioneer and The Wall & Pink Floyd Greatest Hits unites the MM Dance Company, Pink Sonic, the Orchestra Città di Ferrara e il Coro del Teatro Comunale di Ferrara, while with Rapsodia fantastica Giacomo Cuticchio’s music meets his father Mimmo’s Teatro dei Pupi, and Vincenzo Capezzuto and the Motus Mandolin Trio celebrate the 19th-century Neapolitan song. In Cervia-Milano Marittima, Il Trebbo in musica includes Fabrizio Bosso and Julian Oliver Mazzariello‘s tribute to Pino Daniele, Aldo Cazzullo and Moni Ovadia with Il romanzo della Bibbia, Mario Tozzi and jazzman Enzo Favata for a geological-musical examination of the Mediterranean, Dardust with his Urban Impressionism, a new production with Carlo Lucarelli, La Traviata sono io with Alessio Boni on a text by Filippo Arriva, and singer Arooj Aftab with her most recent album Night Reign. The trio of concerts at the Pavaglione di Lugo opens with the Italian premiere of Uri Caine‘s The Passion of Octavius Catto, followed by Enrico Rava and Stefano Bollani, and Malika Ayane, for the first time in a ‘symphonic version’ with La Corelli Orchestra. Palazzo San Giacomo in Russi is the setting for The Night of Spiritual Jazz with Lakecia Benjamin, Hamid Drake and James Brandon Lewis, and The Long Irish Night with the Dervish, Derek Hickey, Mick O’Brien and Ciara Ní Bhriain, and the Birkin Tree.
Cantare Amantis Est
At the centre of the Cantare amantis est project, curated by Anna Leonardi and Michele Marco Rossi, authors of the Call to the Arts in 2024, is singing in its choral dimension. On Sunday 1 and Monday 2 June choirs from all over Italy will take part in rehearsals and lessons on Verdi’s pages under the guidance of Riccardo Muti, while Another Bach in the Wall will present the murals created by artists of the Call to the Arts and the Metropolitan Basilica will host a Jubilee concert.
In the Basilicas
The Festival commissioned a new sacred performance: Rut, raccolti di speranza was composed by Marianna Acito to a libretto by Francesca Masi. The sacred-themed performances include Dietrich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri entrusted to the Choir & Ensemble 1685 of the Ravenna’s Conservatoire, with the visual project by the Academy of Fine Arts, while the oratorio San Giovanni Battista composed by Alessandro Stradella for the Jubilee Year 1675 is performed by the Ensemble Mare Nostrum. The 500th anniversary of Palestrina’s birth is celebrated in San Vitale by the Tallis Scholars, together with Arvo Pärt’s 90th birthday, and the vocal ensemble Odhecaton.
A Festival that Dances
The return of the Les étoiles gala curated by Daniele Cipriani closes the summer programme in a pour homme version, but dance also pays tribute to Ennio Morricone with Notte Morricone by the Centro Coreografico Nazionale/Aterballetto (which also proposes MicroDanze at the Classis Museum). Double homage to Micha van Hoecke with the re-staging of La dernière danse? by Miki Matsuse with the Balletto di Roma and the photographic exhibition La vie d’artiste. Also premiering Fragolesangue by Monica Francia, Ida Malfatti and Zoe Francia Lamattina, a collective experience that reckons with the narratives of another poetic-political era.
The Theatre as a Mirror of the World
With Lysistrata, Marco Martinelli ‘brings back to life’ Aristophanes, thanks to the dialogue between Ravenna and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. If Lysistrata represents civil and pacifist commitment, the portrait of the modern hero includes Don Chisciotte ad ardere by Albe/Ravenna Teatro with the citizens of Public Call; the three parts of the project (including the new third part) will be staged between Palazzo Malagola, Palazzo di Teodorico, and Rasi Theatre. The Grande Teatro Lido Adriano will instead confront the Bhagavad gita, reinterpreted with the involvement of young people and adults from the cosmopolitan resort on the coast. The variations on the theme are completed with Del coraggio silenzioso, a performance by and with Marco Baliani. The theatre section also includes the premiere of Ghosts by Fanny & Alexander, based on Edith Wharton’s ghost stories, and Beckett’s Finale di partita according to Nerval Teatro.
The Autumn Trilogy
This year’s Autumn Trilogy (12-16 November) renews the dialogue between Pier Luigi Pizzi and Accademia Bizantina and Ottavio Dantone and is entirely dedicated to Handel, with two new productions of Orlando and Alcina, plus a performance of the Messiah, in this case with Dantone conducting the Cherubini Orchestra and the Coro della Cattedrale di Siena Guido Chigi Saracini.