Ravenna Festival is wherever you are: you need only access to the Internet to join in, starting from Sunday, 21 June at 21.30 CET, when the opening concert featuring Riccardo Muti, the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra and soprano Rosa Feola shall be live streamed on the website ravennafestival.live, in collaboration with Riccardo Muti Music. The concert will be also live broadcast by Rai Radio 3 on Euroradio. Muti’s concert is only the first of many live streamed events (almost 40); all the events taking place in the Rocca and in Cervia will be online, and everything is for free, without any limitation to the number of users. Among the streamed contents, also the concert filmed in the Basilica of San Vitale without an audience, while the Roads of Friendship concert will be later broadcast by Rai 1. The Festival has thus carried out its project to give access to the greatest number of people, in consideration of the limited number of available seats which owes to the social distancing regulations.
Together with a newly re-imagined 2020 programme featuring over 40 public events and around five hundred artists, the Festival is the forerunner also with regard to the live streaming, which will not be occasional but follow the whole programme (with few exceptions). While the Rocca remains the physical and symbolical space of the return to the live experience, the new website offers a potentially unlimited space to welcome audiences from everywhere.
The quality of the sound shall be the best which can be achieved, the servers are Amazon’s, and all streamed contents – concerts, theatre, dance, talks – are for free. It is a different way to participate, perfect for a 31st edition which strives to reach the largest participation possible: with a varied and rich programme, as usual featuring different genres; with lower-than-average ticket prices ranging from 5 to 40 Euro; now even with the free live streaming.
This year’s challenge? Do not lose one single spectator, but rather take this chance to encourage even more people to discover the Festival.