The Festival delle Nazioni was conceived in 1968 with the aim of promoting the artistic heritage, culture and music of the Upper Tiber Valley, as well as playing a high quality role in the most prestigious Italian and European arenas of cultural events. The Festival’s cultural framework has been characterized since its inception by the choice of one guest country each year. The chosen nation is given the opportunity to present to the public the best of its musical production in a particularly suggestive, natural and architectonic scenery. In this context, the contribution that the Festival delle Nazioni has given to the European integration through art and culture has been universally appreciated. The guest Nation of 42nd Edition of "Festival delle Nazioni" is Great Britain.The 42nd Edition of the Festival Delle Nazioni, taking place from August the 26th to September the 5th 2009, celebrates Great Britain’s musical production. This seems a crucial part of the historical path of this group of islands – Anglesey, Wight, Hebrides, Orkney Islands and Shetland- gathered around the main Isle, Great Britain, their virtue is that of including very different cultures, styles and sensitivities.
Music is another main sign of the contrasts, harmonies and fusions that characterized the complex history of this land. It is also well known how Great Britain represented an appealing destination for musicians, since the Renaissance and up to now. This land seemed attractive both to “cultivated” authors, Germans in particular, in the past centuries and, emblematically, to the pop and rock world during the 70’s and 80’s. Although Great Britain cannot enumerate a number of authors as large as other European nations (such as Germany, France or Italy), it has been able to absorb musical experiences from all over the world. Great Britain is still one of the countries that give a particular importance to music in its citizens’ education.
A clear example of this vocation is the adoption of the German composer Georg Friedrich Händel who, once settled in London, never left. He was influenced by Baroque great composers, such as the Italians and the English Henry Purcell and Händel’s works have had, in their turn, a strong influence both on the contemporary and on future composers, firstly on the Vienna Classicism Masters (Haydn defined him “our master”, Mozart or Beethoven who said “Händel is the greatest and most talented among us, I still have to learn from him”).
Händel wrote all his 42 works for an English audience, totally respecting the Italian vocal style and did the same for his 8 oratorios in English. The Festival will celebrate the 250th anniversary of his death with I Solisti Veneti conducted by Claudio Scimone performing some of the works of Händel, Albinoni and Vivaldi. They will confirm their very unique style with the usage of modern instruments for performing music of the 18th century.
Also Haydn (200th anniversary of his death this year) was enchanted by the charm of the British Isles and during two stays, 1791-’92 and 1794-’95 he wrote and presented his last 12 symphonies, known as Londoner Symphonies, following the pure classic style. The Tokyo Quartet will perform a selection of quartets from op.76, the last complete series of quartets written by Haydn. We will have the chance to listen to the most significant symphonies Haydn wrote in that period, “104”, performed by I Solisti di Perugia.
Mendelssohn, fascinated by the British culture, after having travelled in England and Scotland, composed the famous symphony in la minor called the Scottish according to the “romantic classicist” style, as it was defined by historians. Stewart Robertson, a Scottish conductor, will let us listen to Overture from Hebrides (op.26) and A midsummer night’s dream (op. 61) in its original version composed for Shakespeare’s comedy for an orchestra, female choir, reciting voice, soprano and mezzo-soprano.
A true Londoner, born and bred, was Henry Purcell. Probably one of the most important English musicians of all time together with Britten, he has been able to superimpose the English tradition, the Italian vocal music style and the French instrumental style. Purcell was a model and a source of inspiration for many composers, like Britten himself. He composed anthems (vocal works of biblical inspiration), cantatas, instrumental compositions, stage music, the opera Dido and Aeneas and the semi-opera The Fairy Queen (after Shakespeare’s A midsummer night’s dream).
The Fretwork, a group composed by 6 violas da gamba and voice, will let us enjoy a pastiche of musical fantasias composed by Purcell and his English predecessors such as William Lawes, Matthew Locke (composers of music for royal masques, sacred anthems and motets). On August the 26th, the inauguration concert will be held by Filarmonici del Teatro Comunale di Bologna conducted by Peter Selwyn with Britten’s Prelude and Fugue for 18 strings, the serenata in mi minor by Sir Edward Elgar (a romantic composer, appointed “Master of the King’s Music” by the British Crown in 1924) and St. Paul Suite Gustav Holst. Together with his friend Vaughan Williams and others, Holst was the father of the movement for the re-discovery of the medieval English music, the madrigalists’ of the early 17th century like William Byrd e Thomas Weelkes. The intense study of this material and of the English folk music had a strong influence on him and his works, particularly marked by the new musical dimensions experimented by Stravinskij and Schoenberg.
Thanks to the folk band Fairport Convention, we will enjoy a repertoire of traditional Celtic music, a genre with undefined borders that calls back to a culture and history often mythicized by younger generations and still unclear. The band re-elaborates folk music, traditionally Scottish and Irish, but also from the North of Spain and France. The present re-discovery of this genre and its re-elaboration in a more modern way, so widespread among the youths, might be an answer for the demand of cultural roots and identity, in an moment of fast and ineluctable transformations.
The Hilliard Ensemble will then be on stage, it is a British quartet of male voices founded in 1973 that performs medieval and Renaissance music. The Ensemble, named after the Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, will present English madrigals composed by Cornish, Farnaby, Verdelot, Arcadelt, works of contemporary English authors and Fabio Vacchi’s – in our Festival Commission - Memoria italiana.
Enrico Dindo in a duet with Monica Cattarossi and Danilo Rossi in a duet with Stefano Bezziccheri will present some compositions by Britten and Frank Bridge (English composer, orchestra conductor and violin player, Britten’s master). The following night Stefano Bezziccheri will perform with the 2008 Calpurnia Award Winner, the violin player Luca Guidi.
We will have the chance to listen to Two Majorcan Pieces and the Sonatina for clarinet and piano written in 1981 by Joseph Horovitz (born in Vienna and emigrated to England with his family in 1938 to escape the Nazi extermination) thanks to the duet Corrado Giuffredi - Linda di Carlo. With the duet Federico Mondelci - Filippo Farinelli (saxophone and piano) we will enjoy Paul Creston’s Sonata Op. 19 by Benjamin Britten On This Island Op. 11 and Five Songs, by the contemporary Michael Nyman Shaping The Curve for soprano saxophone and piano.
The actor David Riondino will play, together with Pierluigi Odifreddi and the l’Ensemble degli illuminati, Edwin Abbott’s Romance of Many Dimensions, Flatland. The music, as a countermelody to the multidimensional journey of the protagonist, were commissioned by the Festival to the composer Flavio Emilio Scogna.
In the Festival programme there will be a great novelty, the production of a Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera, The little sweep. Britten has been an important spreader for musical culture, he was very sensitive towards didactic problems and he has been a spokesperson and interpreter of the British musical tradition, preserving for treble voices the protagonist’s role. The Little Sweep brilliantly blends the different levels of difficulty with the different roles for he choir, the soloist kids, the singers and the instruments. It eventually obtains a high quality and well-blended artistic result in a very natural way. In collaboration with the Festival, the staging will be set up by the Modena Pavarotti Theatre Foundation, Stefano Monti will be the director and Mario Cecchetti the conductor. The kids of the treble voices choir “Laeti Cantores” of Città di Castello and of “Il Giardino dell’Armonia” from Perugia took part in a workshop before the performance together with some pilot groups from Città di Castello schools. Festival delle Nazioni, with its root in Città di Castello and in general in the Upper Tiber Valley, wishes to decentralize in important towns near Città di Castello some shows and cultural projects so to give a homogeneous image of the area and with the aim of promoting its high civil profile.
More info on www.festivalnazioni.com
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