Muti ends lockdown in Ravenna
RICCARDO Muti will conduct a youth orchestra in an open-air concert to launch the annual Ravenna Festival next month in what organizers say will be Italy’s first live classical music performance since its lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus.
The Italian government is permitting concerts and other live performances from June 15.
It will open on June 21 with Ravenna native Muti conducting the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra, featuring musicians under the age of 30, inside the 15th-century Rocca Brancaleone fortress. The audience will be limited to 250 people, with mandatory masks, staggered entrances and physical distancing.
On stage, the performers will maintain a distance of 1 meter, expanding to 1.5 to 2 meters between woodwind players. There will be a single singer, soprano Rosa Feola.
The festival, founded 30 years ago by Muti’s wife Cristina, will present 40 performances, with the full program to be announced shortly. While the audience is limited, de Rosa said the performances would also be streamed to a global audience.
“We have the confirmation in these months of the great importance of culture and performance. We listened to music, we read books and we watched many musical performances on television,” de Rosa said. “Now it is the moment to return to the stage with a live performance, with streaming online, to give everyone the possibility to keep alive the flame of music burning within and that must never go out.”
Italy’s native lyric opera is suffering the most even as the country slowly eases its lockdown, due to the increased threat of contagion among a chorus and singers acting out dramatic roles on stage.
Italy’s famed La Scala theater is looking at reopening only in September, with a performance of Verdi’s Requiem in the Milan Duomo to remember Italy’s coronavirus dead followed by Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.
La Scala’s general manager Dominique Meyer said the crisis for the classical music world will deepen in 2021, when there are no longer government programs to help cover theater workers’ salaries and when attendance is likely to still suffer.
“There are not so many moments in history when the future for society is so uncertain,” Meyer said.
“We need to continue, to bring our art ahead and make the audience return to the theater to be together, to experience emotion in front of the performance.”
Meyer said a longer-term solution lies in bringing families and children closer to the theater, inspiring a lifetime love of performance, but also lowering ticket prices — he said they too often are set by “people who don’t have to pay, or don’t have problems paying.”
He also appealed for help for contract singers and performers who have been unable to earn during Europe’s lockdowns and didn’t qualify for various unemployment schemes.
He said the planned performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 — a choral symphony — will carry “a message of home, of friendship and of warmth.”