It will be possible to participate for free in live streaming and on demand (for the next 48 hours) the opening concert of the XX edition of Emilia Romagna Festival, on this site (link in homepage) or on italiafestival.tv, from Italy and abroad, thanks to the collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and with the ItaliaFestival association.
An opportunity to listen to a unique programme in the name of the tutelary deities and true friendships that the festival has built in its first twenty years of activity.
On the stage of the San Domenico Arena in Forlì, Sunday 26 July (9.30 pm), an internationally renowned chamber orchestra, the Solisti Veneti, conducted by Maestro Giuliano Carella, together with Massimo Mercelli’s flute will perform pieces by Giuseppe Tartini, Gioachino Rossini, Ottorino Respighi, Ennio Morricone and Michael Nyman in the Italian premiere.
The common thread of this edition will be the great composers who have gravitated to the festival in all these years, making it an international meeting point thanks to the interpretation and writing of dedicated pieces. The opening concert will metaphorically collect everything has happened in these two decades of festival.
Twenty years ago, the original composition “Contrafactus” by Giovanni Sollima baptized ERF, a piece that had a notable echo, a sound and conceptual encounter of Baroque instinct inspired by Escher and Bach; this year to mark the XX anniversary, a piece by the unforgettable Ennio Morricone, a composition where baroque and atmosphere breathe together: Notturno Passacaglia, dedicated to Massimo Mercelli and Darko Brlek for the 60th anniversary of the European Festival Association, is a short exercise in style where the ancient base, the Passacaglia, marries the programme music of the Genius, with a “cinematographic” result. For the occasion, the Slovenian clarinetist, also artistic director of the Ljubljana Festival, will be next to Mercelli to perform the piece.
Part of the programme will also be the piece by Michael Nyman, a well-known name in world cinema and among the Oscars for soundtracks. For his friend Mercelli, the English composer and pianist had started the creation of a Concerto, the second for the festival, presented at the Teatro La Scala in 2019 in a first draft. In its Italian premiere, the Concerto arrives for this inauguration in a complete form and with a new dedication. The streets of London and the streets of the success have marked in the past the meeting between Nyman and Ezio Bosso, the Maestro whose today this concert wants to celebrate the first year of an immortal life.
Chiudono il programma due pezzi di Giuseppe Tartini, di cui quest’anno il Festival ricorda i 250 anni dalla morte; la Terza sonata in do maggiore per archi di Rossini, frutto del precoce talento del compositore pesarese nei primi anni dell’800; e la Terza suite tratta dalle Antiche Danze ed Arie di Respighi.
The programme ends with two pieces by Giuseppe Tartini, of which this year the Festival commemorates the 250th anniversary of his death; the Third Sonata in C major for strings by Rossini, the result of the early talent of the Pesaro composer in the early 1800s; and the third suite from Respighi’s Antiche Danze e Arie.