Bologna Festival 2024 | When the music embraces the city

43^ season

With a preview distinguished by solidarity, featuring La Scala Philharmonic in a magnificent performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony conducted by Chung, the 2024 season of Bologna Festival unfolds throughout the entire year with various projects, highly characterized for their specificities.

This year’s calendar includes nine festival series, marked by some small but significant innovations compared to the past. Notable among these is the inclusion of a series tailored for the challenging adolescent audience and a new opening to non-Western repertoire in the autumn programs. Bologna Festival evolves within the framework of its significant past but with remarkable attention to the needs and curiosities of the present.

In the “Grandi Interpreti” series, Teodor Currentzis meets our audience for the first time with one of the most beloved pieces: Mozart’s Requiem. Bruce Liu and Alexandre Kantorow, two new stars shining on the keyboards after their victories at the Chopin and Tchaikovsky competitions, will perform in close succession. Janine Jansen and María Dueñas, two violin virtuosos, will tackle Bach and Bruch’s concertos. András Schiff will finally present his Andrea Barca Chapel in Bologna, while under the baton of Vladimir Jurowski, the titled Bavarian State Orchestra will face Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with Emanuel Ax to close the series.

Our “Talenti” will be entrusted with evenings of music under the stars in the Cloister of Santo Stefano, while the autumn series, dedicated to the most sophisticated repertoire of ancient and contemporary music, adds a new facet devoted to oriental music, with a program tracing the footsteps of Marco Polo for the 700th anniversary of his death. Additionally, Rula Jaradat, who impressed the audience during our past journey in Jordan with virtuosity displayed on one of the most characteristic Arab instruments, the qanun, will join this new artistic proposal. Alongside, concerts by the most accredited specialists in pre-classical and contemporary repertoire will alternate, including the King’s Singers in the opening concert on ancient and modern polyphony, baroque virtuoso Stefano Montanari in a program with astonishing 18^th century violin acrobatics, or the rigorous Quartetto Prometeo on Antonioni’s pages in its Italian premiere.

A particular project within the programming is dedicated to the Vivaldi persona, with concerts, meetings, and film programs. The occasion is the definitive attribution of the portrait of the “Red Priest,” preserved at the Museum of Music, to Vivaldi after Federico Maria Sardelli’s recent studies. He will illustrate the events of these researches in the premiere of the concert-reading “Il volto di Vivaldi,” reminding us that the most realistic face of Vivaldi is right here in Bologna, looking at us.