Ravenna Festival

Five Sunday rendezvous in the city’s glorious basilicas will be dedicated to the traditional liturgies of “In Templo Domini”. If the Festival’s title, Ex tenebris ad lucem, is in itself loaded with easily traceable references to the liturgy (the light as a symbol for Christ and the darkness as Evil and a world without Christ), our path deliberately strays from this over-simplistic reduction to avoid the risk of abstractly juxtaposing the dramatic terms of a conflict we intend to catch in the heart of historical vicissitudes, real experience, present events. “The night of the Church”, at San Vitale (June 13), will offer the precious Mass laReverdie discovered in a code of the Cathedral of Sainte-Anne d’Apt: darkness had fallen over a divided Church at a time when there were two Popes, but the light of faith never ceased to express beauty. On the second liturgy (June 20) Sergio Balestracci and his Stagione Armonica will present a programme of great polyphonies, expressions of a new creativity following the Council of Trent. After dark centuries came the dawn of a new light, with the separation from the Reformed Church, and Palestrina is undoubtedly the better-known and most influential interpreter of the Catholic Revival: on June 27, at Sant’Agata Maggiore, Dario Tabbia and the seven choristers of Vox Libera will perform his Christmas Mass, “O Magnum Mysterium”. Light came to the world, and did so through Mary: the fourth liturgy will be dedicated to her (San Vitale, July 4), with the performance of Guillaume Dufay’s mass, “Ecce Ancilla Domini”, by the four solo choristers of Cantica Symphonica. At the end of our path, Schola Gregoriana and Coro Polifonico Paer will perform Orlando di Lasso’s Missa pro Defunctis for the victims of the earthquakes of l’Aquila and Haiti (Duomo, July 11). Light shines on, even through the darkness of death.