Ravenna Festival

Celebrating 25 Years of Festival
On the evening of 1 July 1990 – nine o’clock had just struck when Riccardo Muti raised his baton on the podium of La Scala Theatre Orchestra and the Swedish Radio Choir, and Movement I, Adagio – Allegro spiritoso from Mozart’s Symphony No. 36 in C major, K. 425, known as the Linz Symphony, resounded within the ancient Venetian walls of the Brancaleone Fortress.
This was the birth of the Ravenna Festival: an adagio building up into an inexorable crescendo that celebrates its 25^th anniversary in 2014. It is an important milestone for both the Festival and the city which hosts it and finds in it its most significant voice and expression. Ravenna is now at a crucial moment as a candidate city for European Capital of Culture 2019: after a pre-selection round with 21 applicants, Ravenna is one of the six short-listed cities. This result can be undoubtedly ascribed to the city’s varied and often unsuspected energy, but also to the Festival’s important contribution: with its 25 years of activity, it has transformed the former capital of the Western Roman Empire into the modern capital of music, dance and drama. Moving from the city’s ‘historical’ theatres, the Fortress and the more recent Pala Mauro De André, the Festival has gradually invaded the city, entering churches and other outstanding buildings and re-discovering several surprising new spaces which were often brought back to life and returned to public fruition (see for example the Sulphur Warehouse, the complex of St. Nicholas and the old target-shooting space at the City Dock, to name just a few). The Festival was recently extended to the rest of the year, well beyond the limits of the original summer months, with the brilliant idea of the ‘Autumn Trilogy’, whose formula quickly met with the favour of a large audience, local and international, contributing to a substantial increase in the flow of tourists and giving the city a new dimension as a ‘round-the-clock City of the Arts’. And think of the several topics the Festival has proposed, discussed and thoroughly examined: from the strictly musicological themes of the very first years (‘Around Rossini’, ‘Bellini and Wagner’) to more visionary themes that projected Ravenna - subject and object at one and the same time - into a new Mediterranean, oriental, apocalyptic, visionary or desolate landscape of the soul. And this is how we came to our new theme, centred on the memory of a fateful year marked by terrible events: 1914, the year that changed the world.

The Theme
Few events in modern history have had such a profound impact on European culture as the Great War. Also, such unexpected, devastating and traumatizing turning points are definitely rare and extraordinary: the Great War 1914-1918 produced enormous changes in the political, economic, social and cultural fields, and had an inevitable impact on the more intimate level of the individual conscience. In those years, the flow of life and history was interrupted. The sudden cardiac arrest of European history simultaneously captured the agony of the old world (Finis Austriae, or the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire, The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus...) and the irruption of the new: and while the old world was not yet gone, the new one was not fully developed. Yet it was clearly visible amid flashes and explosions, themselves the vehicles of extremely powerful, unprecedented sound experiences. The Great War taught the multiplication and fragmentation of the visual and sound images of the world, and incorporated changes into the time and space of the previous period, thus marking a decisive step in the Western world’s transition towards mass society (so much so that the Second World War will appear as an extension of WWI). The bloody ‘rite of passage’ of the Great War thus unfolded a new mental landscape (it’s no surprise that Le Sacre du printemps exploded in Paris just a year prior to the conflict). That’s when the mirror of Western civilization was shattered. That’s when, in historian Antonio Gibelli’s words, a ‘clap of thunder tore the veil of progress and flung open the doors of modernity, disclosing its deadly ambivalence.’ The musings of soldier Robert Musil are still quite relevant today: ‘already it sounds incredible how common men, in series, millions of men all over Europe, could live for four years without losing their minds, without losing humanity in a place where life was logically absurd, keeping intact their ability to rejoice, to enjoy small animal pleasures, to cultivate their ties of affection; substituting new values to the desecrated ones, finding in one’s consciousness a justification for absurdity and horror.’ As Eric J. Hobsbawm explains, the large construction of XIX century civilization collapsed in the flames of the Great War and its pillars were shattered. It is impossible to understand the ‘short XX century (1914-1991)’ without thinking of war: these years were branded by wars, and the pace of life and thought was marked by world wars even when guns were silent and bombs were not exploding. Thus WWI, known as the ‘Great War’ since 1915, not only resists time but remains a steady, solid presence in contemporary Western societies a century after its sinister start. A strange presence. The very alternation of generations appears to play a contrary role to what might be expected, and most young people today seem to consider that tragic event as one of the most important in the XX century: the younger the generations, the more importance the Great War acquires. The ties to the ‘events of 1914-18’ are not broken in the Western world: in fact, they seem to be strengthened. Today, despite the many years that have passed, the Great War is still far from sinking into oblivion or causing indifference.
The theme will also be the subject of three meetings, the first of which will serve as a prologue to the Ravenna Festival. On May 29, Massimo Bernardini will meet two giants of Italian cultural life, Lucio Villari and Paolo Rumiz: the great historian and the 'curious' traveller-writer will narrate the year that changed the world. On June 16, Annette Becker, one of the most famous scholars of the Great War and a member of the prestigious Institut Universitaire de France, will hold a lecture entitled "La guerre comme camouflage, le camouflage comme la guerre." On the following day, within the programme of Via Sancti Romualdi, the influential Church historian Alberto Melloni will retrace the winding path of the Catholic Church from the Great War to the present day.

The Concert at Redipuglia
The theme of the ‘Great War’ will be declined in some of its many facets along a path that will lead us to the solemn memorial concert hosted in Redipuglia and enclosed in the programme for the National Commemoration of the First World War. After the usual Pala de André date for the Ravenna audience, the Paths of Friendship project will lead us there for a Requiem for the victims of all wars. Riccardo Muti will conduct the Cherubini Orchestra, the European Spirit of Youth Orchestra and the Choir of Friuli Venezia Giulia in a performance of Verdi’s Requiem Mass, where the orchestras and soloists (soprano Tatiana Serjan, mezzo-soprano Daniela Barcellona, tenor Saimir Pirgu and bass Riccardo Zanellato) will be supported by several other musicians and singers from the countries that took part in the war. No score could be more suitable in excruciatingly portraying the drama of death: quoting Massimo Mila’s words, ‘in the Requiem Mass, and particularly in the Dies Irae, the whole human race behaves like Verdi’s characters and is struck dead like shot waterfowl, suddenly passing from the heat of an intense life to the chill of death.’ And Verdi’s vision surprisingly overlaps with Guido Ceronetti’s, who thus describes the massive shrine in his Viaggio in Italia: ‘The steps of Redipuglia are a mescaline vision. Twelve hundred steps, but they seem a lot more: one million, or maybe six hundred thousand, as many as the dead. And all of them speak, all of them shout a single word that sounds like the distant thunder of artillery: Present. We have tried to appease them with the shrine, with the marble, with a special liturgy, because we surely feared the wrath of those dead.’ And now Verdi, foreboding the forthcoming catastrophe, will give powerful voice to the wrath of millions of young broken lives.

Symphonic Music
A particularly rich section of the Festival is dedicated to symphonic music with some of the best conductors of our time, whose names are familiar to the Festival’s audience: Yuri Temirkanov will conduct the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra with Russian solo violinist Vadim Repin in a programme of Russian composers ranging from Tchaikovsky to Stravinsky; American Kent Nagano with the Cherubini Youth Orchestra and Viennese pianist Till Fellner will propose a magnificent Brahms programme that would have delighted Françoise Sagan; Valery Gergiev will lead the emblazoned Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and young Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son in an all-Russian programme featuring composers from Mussorgsky to Rachmaninov. Riccardo Muti will conduct the Cherubini in the above-mentioned Requiem Mass and in a concert with French solo pianist David Fray performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. This concert has a very special meaning for Riccardo Muti as a symbolic gesture of reciprocity: he has invited the Cherubini to join the Orchestra Giovanile Italiana in a tribute to Claudio Abbado, the late great conductor, whom Muti defines as ‘a fellow traveller in the wonderful boundless country of Music.’

Nineteen-fourteen
One of the 1914-related events features Moni Ovadia and Lucilla Galeazzi in a Ravenna Festival-Mittlefest commission, Doppio Fronte. Oratorio per la grande guerra. They will propose a new, heterogeneous interpretation of the Great War from the bottom-up perspective of lower-class people from all over Italy (indeed, the country’s unity was only actually achieved behind the lines of the tremendous conflict, in its trenches and on its battlefields): their songs, letters and diaries from the front will come back to life with no empty ‘patriotic’ rigmarole. Actress-director Elena Bucci and composer-accordionist Simone Zanchini will propose Colloqui con la cattiva dea, ‘small stories from a great war’. German singer Ute Lemper and the Cherubini Youth Orchestra conducted by Tonino Battista will pay a tribute to Eric J. Hobsbawm, who was also a jazz enthusiast: Canzoni dal Secolo Breve: 1914-1991 [Songs from the Short Century: 1914-1991] will take us on an intriguing musical journey from the Great War to the fall of the Berlin Wall. A concert by piano duo Arciuli-Rebaudengo (with percussionists Andrea Dulbecco and Luca Gusella), specifically conceived for the Festival, will propose some works by Debussy and Casella on the theme of the Great War, alongside music by Bartók, whose gloomy and disturbing Sonata for two pianos and percussion was already a presage of WWII, and, inevitably, Stravinsky.
The echo of that universal wound is heard in XX century choral music as well, in some great scores that Sergio Balestracci’s choir, La Stagione Armonica, will propose alongside Arnold Schönberg’s a-cappella choral work Friede auf Erden [Peace on Earth], set to an anti-war text by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer expressing the poet’s heartfelt desire for peace in response to the winds of war that would soon blow all over Europe. Pizzetti's Requiem and Kurt Weill’s Legend of the Dead Soldier on lyrics by Bertolt Brecht will then lead us to Un albero verde (A Green Tree), especially composed by Balestracci on a poem originally included in the Il mio Carso collection by Irredentist poet Scipio Slataper.
Ambrogio Sparagna’s Le trincee del cuore (The trenches of the heart) falls into the same thematic area and proposes Italian and foreign popular songs from the First World War: songs on the atrocities of the war and on the pride of belonging to a military corps but also on distant loves and hopes, and on the little joyful moments in daily life. On stage with Sparagna will be the Orchestra Popolare dell'Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, Coro Amarcanto and Compagnia dell'Alba from Ortona, while special guest Peppe Servillo will lend his deep, warm voice and his storytelling and acting skills to a series of dialect songs, often ironic and goliardic, meant to exorcise the fear of death.
This series of theme events, all original productions by Ravenna Festival, is complemented by a further traditional appointment: a trek, a sort of pilgrimage through the city and its surroundings. But the traditional walking trek will be a bike ride this year, in a sort of tribute to the legendary Bersaglieri bicycle troops and their humble but reliable mount. During the Great War, the port of Ravenna housed a still visible seaplane base, targeted by the Austrians on May 24, 1915, immediately after the declaration of war on Austria-Hungary, when a destroyer attacked Porto Corsini and killed Natale Zen, one of the first Italian casualties in the Great War and a sad record in the history of our city. The very same port will be the final stage for Fronte dei Porti, a bike trek across the history of the Ravenna ports with a ‘minimal’ outdoor dance performance of Early Works by Trisha Brown Dance Company.
But 1914 also saw the publication in nearby Marradi of one of the most unique works of Italian literature, Dino Campana’s Orphic Songs. This anniversary prompted the Festival to team with Trail Romagna and follow the traces left by Campana, often seen as the only Italian example of poète maudit, in an extraordinary experience celebrating the two passions of the poet from Marradi: walking and poetry. Actor Gianfranco Tondini, a new Dino Campana, will give us a first-hand account of the poet’s life and wanderings on the hike from Castagno d'Andrea to Rifugio Burraia, in an “itinerant monologue” written by Iacopo Gardelli and Elia Tazzari. Music will be provided by Orphic Duo (Fabio Mina, flutes, and Marco Zanotti, percussions).

Music and War at the Rasponi dalle Teste Palace
The ‘war’ theme will be further developed into one of the Festival’s sections, ‘Music and War’. With a time-frame ranging from the Renaissance to the present day, this 3-day section will feature, among others: Ensemble Ottoni Romantici (Viaggio musicale dal Risorgimento alla Resistenza); La Venexiana, conducted by Claudio Cavina in the inevitable Combat of Tancredi and Clorinda by Monteverdi; Ensemble La Pifarescha (Musiche rinascimentali d’amore e di battaglia); Cafebaum Banda Barocca with puppeteer Giacomo Cuticchio (Cavalleresche gesta fra Händel e teatro dei pupi). It’s just a small step from Sicilian marionettes to hand puppets: and here’s Sergio Diotti and Stefano Giunchi’s Sganapino in trincea, eroe suo malgrado, with period music for barrel organ.
All these events - that with the two concerts by Arciuli-Rebaudengo and La Stagione Armonica complete the ‘Music and War’ cycle - will be housed in an extraordinary venue, recently saved from oblivion by the accurate restoration financed by the Del Monte Foundation: the Rasponi dalle Teste Palace, built in the early XVII century by an unknown architect, will soon be returned to public fruition in all its aristocratic glow. This amazing Palace, with a magnificent staircase and sumptuous baroque and rococo interiors openly clashing with an austere classical façade, will renew the Festival’s virtuous habit of ‘re-discovering’ a new venue year after year, a venue which is an event in itself, a rightful protagonist of the Festival.
The Palace will become a ‘theatre’ for a site-specific project by Gruppo Nanou, whose founders/leaders Marco Valerio Amico and Rhuena Bracci see their 1914 not as annus horribilis but rather as the fulcrum of a mental and concrete change in the perception of the world, featuring Freud’s early studies, the gramophone, the cinema of Georges Méliès, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Arthur Schnitzler, the birth of Expressionism, the intuition of Surrealism, Brassaï’s photos and Hans Bellmer’s art. As one of the events of the ‘Strictly Confidential’ section of the Festival, 1914 will lead its audience into a maze of objects, sounds and choreographic fragments capable of ‘spatialising’ and generating a whole universe, an imaginary landscape. The ballroom of the Rasponi dalle Teste Palace will also host a unique baroque cello event with Mauro Valli, whom Giovanni Sollima defined ‘an extraordinary baroque cellist, indeed one of the greatest today’: after the first complete performance of Angelo Berardi’s music in modern times (Ravenna Festival 2011), Valli will propose the works of another important but underrated composer of our region, Domenico Gabrielli aka ‘Minghein dal viulunzel’, the Chapel master in the Basilica of San Petronio, Bologna, and the author of the first composition for a solo cello. Bach himself was probably inspired by Gabrielli’s Ricercare into composing his famous Cello Suites. A close comparison between the two composers and their solo cello scores will be made by Mauro Valli (cello) with Franco Costantini (narrator), proposing an imaginary but not improbable correspondence between the two, conceived by musicologist Piero Mioli.

Dinner with OperaUpClose
Musical theatre also features in the programme with the new versions of such opera blockbusters as Bohème and L’Elisir d’amore by the young and energetic crew of OperaUpClose, the innovative and daring London-based opera company run by Robin Norton-Hale. The ensemble learnt the ropes in one of London’s few surviving pub theatres, the King’s Head in Islington, and immediately became a cult phenomenon with critics and media and the recipient of such prestigious prizes as the ‘Olivier Award’ for Bohème. OperaUpClose has succeeded in the difficult task of attracting an increasing audience of young and not-so-young people to melodrama with its captivating, sometimes irreverent but always smart revisions. This will be the first opportunity for the Italian audience to see for themselves the unmistakable style and minimal sets of OperaUpClose, migrated from the metropolitan atmosphere of an English pub to our local taverns: Osteria del Mariani (formerly an XIX century theatre and then Ravenna’s first cinema) will be the most suitable venue for the creations of OperaUpClose, included in a section called ‘Dinner with Opera.’

Dance & Ballet
The dance and ballet programme is quite varied. The Festival will open with Svetlana Zakharova, widely regarded as the greatest Russian ballerina, and three étoiles from the Bolshoi Theatre accompanied by the Cherubini Youth Orchestra led by Zakharova’s own husband, Vadim Repin, in the dual role of violinist and conductor: an important event confirming the top quality of our 25 programme. An equally important event will be the European premiere of Chéri, a New York dance-theatre production by director-choreographer Martha Clarke, based on Colette’s eponymous novel set in Paris during the Great War. It will star Alessandra Ferri, the étoile of American Ballet Theatre, Herman Cornejo, and Amy Irving, a favourite actress of such great directors as Steve Soderbergh and Brian De Palma, who saw her debut in Carrie: many will also remember her unforgettable appearance in Barbra Streisand’s Yentl. The third appointment, on the stage of Pala De André, will feature the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Geneve in two major Italian premieres: Lux, choreographed by Ken Ossola, and Glory, choreographed by Andonis Foniadakis. It will then be the turn of one of the most important and influential American choreographers, Trisha Brown, a pioneer of Postmodern Dance with her own Dance Company.
The Festival will then host the Italian debut of emerging French choreographer Olivier Dubois’s latest creation: Souls, with six dancers from six different African countries.
Italian contemporary dance will be the protagonist of a special space with two new stages of Marinella Guatterini’s RIC.CI project (Reconstruction Italian Contemporary Choreography): the revival of Michele Abbondanza’s Terramara and Pupilla, by Valeria Magli. Russian-Flemish choreographer Micha van Hoecke will retrace his artistic career and the 25 years of his close collaboration with the city of Ravenna and with Ravenna Festival: the young students of local dance schools will be involved in a brand-new ‘choral’ creation called Le Maître et la Ville.

Drama
Alongside the above-mentioned ‘war theme’ productions, the drama section of this year’s Festival will propose A te come te, a poignant ‘staged reading’ by Ermanna Montanari, conceived by Gabriele Allevi and Luca Doninelli on texts by Giovanni Testori and directed by Marco Martinelli. The section also features the debut of Father and Son, the stage version of Michele Serra’s recent bestseller Gli sdraiati, with Claudio Bisio directed by Giorgio Gallione.
A te come te, featuring 2013 “Eleonora Duse” Prize winner Ermanna Montanari, for the first time stages a selection of memorable articles by Giovanni Testori, whose journalistic production is no less interesting than his dramas, poetry, fiction and critical essays. These dramatic, often desperate stories are seen by the pitiful but sharp eye of the author, capable of finding traces of unquenchable Hope even in the most atrocious injustice and tragedy. Michele Serra instead, in his latest and highly topical novel, explores the mysteriously problematic world of today’s teenagers: he spares no criticism on either children or fathers, and unmercifully depicts their misunderstandings, their conflicts, their lost opportunities, their sense of guilt and a feeling of mutual hostility no wisdom can quench.
2014 will also see the third anniversary of the NAT project (Network for African Talents), coordinated by Ravenna Festival with Kulungwana (Maputo - Mozambique), Takku Ligey Association (Senegal) and Fatej Festival by Théatre du Chocolat Yaoundé (Cameroon) with the support of the European Union. The project will promote two theatre productions with a strong musical component. One is Opera Lamb, directed by Mandiye N’Diaye, the founder and leader of Takku Ligey: it is inspired by Senegalese wrestling (‘laamb’ in the local language), now a national sport and an important social phenomenon with a heavy impact on the country’s economy. The second is Night Commuters, Bambini che non dormono mai, conceived by Guido Barbieri and Oscar Pizzo and centred on the unbelievable dramatic story that, during the latest Ugandan civil war, has seen the children of rural villages in the district of Gulu flee their homes at sunset to escape abduction by Joseph Kony’s bloodthirsty army, and wander through the night, unable to sleep.

Sunday Liturgies and Sacred Music
The traditional appointment for the four Sunday liturgies in the beautiful basilicas of Ravenna will also dwell on the Great War theme. No ideology or study, proceeding by categories and statements of principle, can reach - or bothers to reach - the tragedy of real flesh-and-blood men. Who can embrace their mystery, who can enter the most contradictory paradox of human conflicts to become a companion for those who, on opposite sides and with different uniforms, share ‘a common mood’? Music and singing are the most direct expression of this human ‘mood’, that has imbued the rarefied harmonies of Alpine choirs, evoking both the magnificence of Creation and the excruciating scenario of bloody, exhausting battles: from the trenches and from the natural boundary lines of the Alps comes the echo of voices celebrating the grandeur of a Presence made closer and unshakable by the nearby peaks, even in the devastation of war and massacre. The first two liturgies feature two vocal groups from the far reaches of the Alps: on the one hand are Armonici Cantori Solandri from Trento, the soloists from the Santa Lucia di Magras choir, who have dedicated themselves to researching the rich heritage of sacred and traditional music in the valleys of Trentino Alto Adige for more than 20 years. On the other hand is Corou de Berra, founded in Nice in 1986 with the purpose of revisiting the traditional sacred and profane songs of the Mediterranean Alps area (Provence, Piedmont, Liguria and the Nice region), which is also the protagonist of La Guerra di Piero, a concert in the Cloister of the Classense Library named after Fabrizio de André’s song. This song will be proposed together with a selection of songs of war and love from the geographical area which gave birth to the great Genoese singer-songwriter.
Going back a few centuries in history, we will return to XVI and XVII century Europe, the theatre of countless armed conflicts but also a land united by common feelings, crossed and devastated by fighting armies but also a place where musicians, poets, painters and architects – in one word, artists – travelled from one court to another spreading beauty as the most distinctive and strongest trait of European identity. On both sides of the Alps, across national borders, European cathedrals resounded with the harmonies of great polyphonists who, in their own personal way, fostered the development of a common language. Iberian group La Grande Chapelle will dedicate a Mass to some great Spanish composers of the Renaissance, like Cristóbal de Morales, Francisco Guerrero and Tomás Luis de Victoria, very well-known beyond the borders of the Iberian Peninsula: they will take us back to the musical climate of a liturgical celebration in XVI century Seville. With ensemble La Venexiana, then, we will relive the atmosphere of a mass in Venice just a few decades later, when Giovanni Rovetta, a singer in the choir of the renowned St. Mark’s basilica, replaced Claudio Monteverdi as chapel master. The singers of La Grande Chapelle will then propose another concert of sacred music in the San Vitale basilica, centred on the ‘Jubilate Deo Omnis Terra’ motet which Cristóbal de Morales, a model for XVI century Italian and Flemish polyphonists, wrote on a commission by Pope Paul III to celebrate the Treaty of Nice in 1538.

The Merrymaking: Enchanted Beasts, Weddings and ‘Taranta’ Dancers
The visionary singer-songwriter from Irpinia, Vinicio Capossela, is back at the Festival with a two-part focus: Il carnevale degli animali e alter bestie d’amore is an upscale project where the famous composition by Camille Saint-Saëns and the songs by Capossela are sewn together in a narrative that leads the audience through the stories of legendary animals, symbols and bestiaries, on a ride with the ‘enchanted beasts’, as the animals performing with acrobats were once called. The second event, La Banda della Posta, sees Capossela with a group of elderly musicians from Calitri performing a repertoire of popular danceable wedding songs.
Carte blanche was also given to Giovanni Sollima, a frequent guest of the Ravenna Festival, who will feature in two events, seemingly at odds with each other: in Tenebrae. The Prince of Musicians, the Sollima will pay a tribute to Gesualdo, to his chromatic language and his dramatic boldness, while in the enthralling Notte della Taranta he will play and conduct an orchestra of over thirty elements in a personal interpretation of pizzica, the popular folk dance from the Salento peninsula. Both La Notte della Taranta and Capossela’s Banda della Posta will be hosted at Russi, in the picturesque setting of XVII-century Palazzo San Giacomo, the former summer residence of the noble Rasponi family. It is worth noticing how two of this year’s Festival major venues are closely related to this great family, whose story was inextricably interwoven with the city’s for over four centuries. It should also be noted that the Rasponi family was among the promoters of several local cultural institutions, such as the Philharmonic, Drama and Fine Arts Academies and the new Alighieri Theatre.
More music will enliven one of the Festival's traditional open spaces: the Rocca Brancaleone will provide a stage for the unmistakable magnetic voice of talented Anna Calvi, and for Claudio Coccoluto, who will start with FoleyMandala, interacting with Matteo Scaioli's synthesizers and percussions and with David Loom's original live visual design, and then continue the show with one of his famous high-energy-content late-night DJ sets.

Music and Cinema: Charlie Chaplin to Buñuel
The series of concerts/visions combining music and cinema will be resumed this year with two appointments at the Brancaleone Fortress. The Concert for film and orchestra is an original project by Sacri Cuori, a cult band from Romagna with a worldwide vocation, who recently signed the soundtrack of Matteo Oleotto’s recent feature film, Zoran il mio nipote scemo, winner of the Critics’ Week prize at the Venice Film Festival. The band, together with Evan Lurie, will pay homage to one of the greatest directors of the twentieth century, Luis Buñuel, the most famous exponent of Surrealist cinema, a close friend of Salvador Dalí and the author of such emblematic and iconoclastic films as The Milky Way or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. With his brother John, Evan Lurie was a founding member of legendary Lounge Lizards, the stars of New York City’s No Wave art scene, then he started to compose music for independent films, including Benigni’s Il piccolo diavolo and Johnny Stecchino.
Not only did 1914 see the outbreak of the WWI, but it also marked the birth of Charlot, the unforgettable tramp created by Charlie Chaplin, a character who proved better than anyone else at telling the story of the ‘short XX century’. The Festival dedicates a special event to the Tramp, in collaboration with the cinemathèque of Bologna that, on request of Chaplin’s heirs, has set up a Chaplin Project with the delicate task of restoring the entire catalogue of his works. Making a Living (1914, his first short film), Shoulder Arms (1918, starring Charlot as a soldier in the Great War), and The Immigrant (1917) will be presented with live music by a world-famous specialist, Timothy Brock, conducting the Orchestra of Teatro Comunale, Bologna.

The Autumn Trilogy: the Mariinsky Theatre Ballet and Orchestra
After a great success with audience and critics in 2012 and 2013, featuring two Verdi trilogies in celebration of the composer’s 200 birthday, the month of October will re-propose the innovative formula of the Autumn Trilogy, extending the Festival’s length and the city’s cultural offer well beyond the summer season and promoting cultural tourism (it is worth noting that, during the Shakespeare-Verdi Trilogy, the presence of 1,200 foreign visitors was recorded in town). The undisputed star this year will be the Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, probably one of the most celebrated ballet teams in the world alongside the Bolshoi’s and a few others, whose excellence has never been questioned in over 150 years of history. Such a tight succession of masterpieces has no precedents, not even at the Mariinsky Theatre itself: within a single week, the Autumn Trilogy will schedule Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov), Giselle (music by Adolphe-Charles Adam and choreography by Petipa, Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot) and Trittico ‘900, a tribute to the great choreographers who made the Mariinsky a legend from Peter the Great’s splendid city at the mouth of the Neva. The triptych includes: Chopiniana (Les Sylphides, music by Chopin and choreography by Mikhail Fokin), Apollo (on Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète, choreographed by George Balanchine) and Rubies (from Jewels, once again choreographed by Balanchine on music by Stravinsky).