Ravenna Festival

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.