THE CENTER OF MUSIC

Concerts in the Gavazzeni Auditorium
5th edition

Eight concerts scheduled on Saturday afternoons in the Ridotto Gavazzeni of the Donizetti Theater: back for the fifth consecutive year is Il Centro della Musica, a well-established event promoted by the Donizetti Theater Foundation in collaboration with the Bergamo City Council’s Social Policies Department. Eight concerts, scheduled between May 23 and July 11, offering a wide cross-section of sounds, rhythms and colors hosted in a cozy venue that enhances the intimate dimension of the concert by encouraging a more direct, almost confidential listening. A precious opportunity to be able to enter the city’s main theater and its Ridotto named after a great conductor, on an unusual day and time. An original way to experience the city center by combining the magic of music with being together in the theater.

“At its fifth edition, The Center for Music is one of the initiatives that best testifies to our Foundation’s openness to musical realities, and therefore cultural realities in a more general sense, of our territory, reflecting a spirit of sharing artistic proposals that is naturally transmitted in the “dialogue” established between performers and audience.” specifies Massimo Boffelli, General Director of the Donizetti Theater Foundation, “The renewed collaboration with the Department of Social Policies of the City of Bergamo is a sign of an institutional synergy that aims to make the most of an initiative with an inclusive character, intended for audiences of all ages.” “This year also consolidates the partnerships with the Orchestra Filarmonica Italiana, Ensemble Locatelli, CDpM, and Associazione Musica Aperta, already present in previous editions of Il Centro della Musica and in other festivals promoted by our Foundation, while we welcome the entry of the Vittorio Polli and Annamaria Stoppani Foundation, the Società del Quartetto and the Associazione La Magnifica Comunità. The increase in the number of concerts and thus partners is further proof of the vitality of the review itself,” Boffelli continued.

The fifth edition of The Center for Music begins May 23 with a piano recital by Costanza Principe, featuring Robert Shumann’s Kinderszenen, Op. 15 and Three Fantastic Pieces, Op. 111, two collections that, despite their seemingly fragmentary dimensions, draw a coherent path between memory, imagination and restlessness. The concert is in collaboration with the Vittorio Polli and AnnaMaria Stoppani Foundation and the Victor de Sabata and Aldo Ceccato Music Library.

This will be followed on May 30 by La Magnifica Quartet, a string quartet emanating from the La Magnifica Comunità Association. The heart of the program, which will include the performance of Franz Joseph Haydn’s famous Quartet Op. 76 No. 2 at the beginning, will be the music of Antonín Dvořák, whose Quartet No. 12 “American” , which originated during the Bohemian composer’s stay in the United States, and the Zwei Waltzes Op. 54, which offer a more intimate and lighter look, where the elegance of the waltz is colored with freshness and liveliness.

There are two appointments bearing the seal of the Orchestra Filarmonica Italiana, the first of which, on June 6, with the curious title of “The Half Seasons,” promises an interweaving of famous jazz standards with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by theOFI Jazz Acoustic String, with Cesare Carretta in the role of violin soloist, as well as arranger and creator of the project. Then, on June 13, it will be the turn of the Verdi Project “Verdi 1901,” with the Mascoulisse Quartet, a trombone-only ensemble that will make moments from Verdi masterpieces such as Rigoletto, Nabucco and La Traviata.

On June 20, the violin-piano duo Agnese Ferraro and Monica Cattarossi will offer on behalf of the Società del Quartetto di Bergamo a journey into French music between the 19th and 20th centuries, built around the voices of some of the most significant European composers of the time, Louise Farrenc, Cécile Chaminade, Lili Boulanger and Germaine Tailleferre.

Pianist Claudio Angeleri, the heart and soul of CDpM, will have the task, on June 27, of introducing the audience to the world of jazz, with “From Be To Pops,” a project hinged on the jazz reinterpretation of famous songs written by great Italian songwriters, from Gino Paoli to Fabio Concato, from Bruno Martino to Pino Donaggio, and made famous over the years by influential national and international performers such as Mina, Ornella Vanoni, Joao Gilberto Gil, and Elvis Presley.

The festival will continue on July 4 with a plunge into Baroque music, thanks toEnsemble Locatelli, which, together with Dutch recorder virtuoso Teun Wisse, will perform music by Vivaldi, Telemann, Johann Friedrich Fasch and Giovanni Battista Sammartini written for an instrument capable of reflecting diverse national identities and at the same time an authentically European spirit.

Finally, on July 11, Gianluigi Trovesi, the most international of Orobica’s jazz musicians, and cellist Marco Remondini will join the Gruppo Fiati Musica Aperta to give voice to “Giocando con le note,” an encounter between music and words conceived by Pieralberto Cattaneo: Renaissance villanelles, madrigals by Gesualdo, Puccini and more will provide the backdrop for a multiplied and diffuse play of mirrors that will also include the reading of a story by Marco Buscarino.

All concerts will start at 5 p.m., with the exception of the one on May 23, scheduled at 6 p.m.