Otherworldly realms and magical beings in ancient Nordic traditions

A journey into the afterlife on the wings of an ancient Norwegian poem; enchanting spirits that populate traditional Swedish ballads and legends: Brú's music lifts the thin veil between reality and mystery and leaves us with a question... “Is there really a boundary?”

Concept, composition, and arrangements by Krishna Nagaraja

Program:

• Draumkvæde I: The frame of the vision
  (trad. Norwegian / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Swedish Medieval Ballad: "Herr Olof"
  (trad. Swedish / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Intermezzo: "Polska efter Pelle Fors"
  (trad. Swedish / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Draumkvæde II: Gjallarbrú, the bridge to the afterlife and its fierce guardians
  (trad. Norwegian / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• The Blue Goat set
  (trad. Swedish / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Swedish Medieval Ballad: "Lindormen" ("The Dragon-Serpent")
  (trad. Swedish & A. Norudde / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Intermezzo: "GjallarBrú"
  (K. Nagaraja)
• Draumkvæde III: Journey beyond death
  (trad. Norwegian / arr. and improvised Brú)
• Himlens polska (Polska of Paradise)
  (trad. Swedish / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Dansen Ungdom (Dance, young people)
  (trad. Swedish / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Martins Begravning (Martin is buried)
  (trad. Swedish / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Intermezzo: "Näckens polska" ("The Näcken’s polska")
  (trad. Swedish, text A.A. Afzelius (1812) / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Draumkvæde IV: The Day of Judgment
  (trad. Norwegian / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Domedagslåtten (The Day of Judgment)
  (trad. Norwegian)
• Swedish Medieval Ballad: "Näcken och Jungfrun" ("The Näcken and the Maiden")
  (trad. Swedish and Norwegian / arr. K. Nagaraja)
• Draumkvæde V: Epilogue
  (trad. Norwegian / arr. K. Nagaraja)

MAXIMA IMMORALIA
Chamber opera for voices and instruments

Libretto and music: Orazio Sciortino – Edizioni Curci

Orazio Sciortino – Conductor

Voices:
Maria Eleonora Caminada
Giulia Peri
Giulia Zaniboni

GAMO Ensemble
Marco Facchini – Violin
Lucio Labella Danzi – Cello
Nicola Tommasini – Accordion
Fabio Fornaciari – Piano
Federico Tramontana – Percussion

Maxima immoralia is a chamber opera between eros and satire. The libretto was written in the style of that successful, daring, and irreverent literature, in prose and verse, produced between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. 

On stage there is only one character, a single woman, but with three voices, who recounts, through a structure of closed numbers, unconsummated marriages, prostitute nuns, dormant desires and daring fantasies, references to unedifying episodes in the history of the Church, with nods to the world of madrigals representative of the Baroque era, grotesque masks, and even popular cunto. 

Live music, made up of sounds suspended in time and based on unconventional sound emission techniques, in which a small ensemble together with a vocal trio takes the audience on a poetic journey full of biting irony.

J. S. Bach – Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (version for string trio)

A masterpiece of keyboard music (and music in general), the Goldberg Variations are presented here in a version for string trio. This composition, completely unusual for Bach, who had rarely written a theme and variations before, is said to have been written for the young virtuoso pianist Goldberg to help his patron and commissioner of the variations, Count Keyserling, fall asleep. A circular work made up of golden proportions both in its overall structure and in the individual variations, which sometimes (as in the Quodlibet) echo German folklore. ‘It is music, in short, that knows neither beginning nor end, music without a real climax and without a real resolution’ (Glenn Gould).

J. S. Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major, BWV 1048

Jean Sibelius: Canzonetta, Op. 62a

Vanni Moretto: Ex silentio (Italian premiere)

W. A. Mozart: Piano Concerto in E-flat major, K. 271 “Jeunehomme”

This program could be considered a small compendium of the different ways in which the individual elements that make up an orchestra can interact and relate to each other.

In Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto, written for nine strings (divided into groups of three) and basso continuo, the individual components are called upon to engage in a dense concertante dialogue in which the responsibility for both the solo passages and the dense, pulsating texture that sustains and drives the entire composition is shared equally by all. After this sort of incandescent fireball, which, except for a brief central suspension, releases energy with equal intensity throughout its development, we move on to Jean Sibelius's ‘Canzonetta’, taken from the incidental music for the play ‘Kuolema’ (death in Finnish). Here, it is the power of the melody that shapes the writing of the piece, organizing the sections of the ensemble into singing roles, alternately entrusted to the first violins and cellos, and accompanying roles. The rarefied atmosphere, the pace, and the “color” of the sound prepare the audience for the third piece on the program: Ex Silentio by Vanni Moretto. Presented here in its Italian premiere, this piece, commissioned from the Milanese composer in 2024 by the Opéra-Théâtre de Clermont-Ferrand, features a new distribution of roles dictated by the form of the concerto for solo instrument and orchestra.  The orchestra opens the piece by offering a landscape with uncertain contours from which the solo violin draws the elements to shape form and meaning; on the one hand, the world, on the other, the individual experience that interprets and shapes it in its own interiority and determines its narrative. Another piece for solo instrument and orchestra, this time no longer for strings alone, concludes the program. This is Mozart's Piano Concerto K. 271, “Jeunehomme.” In the evolution of this form, to which Mozart made an enormous contribution, the Jeunehomme represents a decisive turning point between the style of the Salzburg period and that of the Viennese period. The soloist dialogues with the orchestra from the very first bars, according to a concept that clearly goes beyond the juxtaposition of soloist and orchestra, intertwining the musical discourse in a logic of continuous exchange. The protagonist is precisely this dialogue, rich in ideas, surprises, digressions, and different emotional states. It is a hierarchically mobile dynamic to which the soloist and orchestra contribute with equal force of necessity.

Music around Caribe

The concert dedicated to René Francisco's exhibition, linking back to its title, celebrates the collaboration between the Cuban double bass player and two of the most important names in jazz and Latin music, in a unique encounter inspired by the musical form that first spread from Cuba to Europe: the Habanera. An unprecedented set that moves through the intertwining of Latin American forms, to which so much musical imagery on both sides of the ocean is indebted.

Gaston Joya - double bass

Gabriele Mirabassi - clarinet

Roberto Taufic - guitar

Tragicomic burlesque

A show by Andrea Chenna based on Mozart and Da Ponte

What if Don Giovanni were a comic opera? 

This surprising, entertaining and cultured show invites the audience to rediscover Mozart's masterpiece with new eyes. Based on Da Ponte's letters and the original stories, this version of Don Giovanni reveals the comic roots of the myth: romantic duets that become farcical sketches, talking statues that seem like commedia dell'arte pranks, and a Leporello transformed into an irresistible Harlequin.

With only four actor-singers, one musician and the support of technology, the show mixes theatre, music and cabaret to recount, with lightness and intelligence, one of the great myths of the West. 

Don Giovanni Unplugged entertains with elegance and surprises with its irony, intertwining music, literature and theatre in a lively and unpredictable stage performance. Between duels, disguises and commedia dell'arte jokes, the audience finds itself immersed in a world where myth bends to a smile and tradition is renewed with lightness.

A brilliant theatrical experience, capable of enchanting even those who think they already know this story.

Marcello Fera - Follephonia Doppia for violin, vibraphone and strings
Albert Doppler - Concerto in D minor for two flutes and orchestra
Francis Poulenc - Concerto in D minor for two pianos and orchestra

in cooperation with Musikschule Meran
https://deutsche-bildung.provinz.bz.it/de/musikschulen/home

Melika Ngombe Kolongo aka Nkisi is a London-based experimental musician and artist with a Kongo family history. As part of the Merano Arte Aerolectics exhibition, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński invites Nkisi for a sound performance that resonates with elements of the exhibition. The name Nkisi refers to the fetishes widespread in much of central Africa, bearers of spiritual and non-material power. Her sound performances weave together experimentation with ancient musical techniques, liveness and the active involvement of the audience, who in dance, with their bodies, are invited to incorporate sound traditions that imply cultural resistance to the power structures of the global present.

Masimba Hwati - Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński 
Storming Breath. Soundings to Asue* (2025)

Masimba Hwati is an artist born in Mhondoro (Zimbabwe) who experiments with sound, sculpture, video and performance. With ‘found objects’ assembled on site, Hwati creates performable sculptures like wind instruments to which new life is breathed into with the breath of the musicians who manipulate them.

Masimba Hwati's performance is in combination with Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński's exhibition Aerolectics 

The Adventures of Pinocchio, a sacred book
Igor Sibaldi unveils the treasures contained in Collodi's famous tale

Igor Sibaldi, a writer, philologist, translator and essayist whose breadth of interests and fields of enquiry go well beyond the aforementioned qualifications, proposes his reading of Collodi's text, which far from being considered ‘only’ a children's book or ‘only’ a literary masterpiece, is presented as a true sacred text, dense with biblical references and liberating indications for human existence rooted in ancient knowledge.

Igor Sibaldi, born of a Russian mother and an Italian father, was initially a translator for Mondadori of various works, especially by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, for whom he also wrote monographs and introductory essays. He then dedicated himself to his work as an author and to philosophical and theological research.
As an author, he has to his credit an endless bibliography that includes non-fiction, fiction and theatre. He is also known to the public for his oratorical skills, which are expressed in numerous lectures and seminars.

Gabriele Mirabassi and Simone Zanchini in concert:

Top meeting between two great virtuosi of their instrument, as well as protagonists of the international music scene. The musical transversality that distinguishes both of them allows them to express themselves with ease in both the world of jazz and classical music. In this duo, the sensuality of South American rhythms and the pulsating depth of old swing are mixed with the sonorities of a modern, contemporary jazz that is expressed in the compositional style of both
 

Twins in Heaven and on Earth
Riccardo Nova: Rudra Mantra, Kunti Mantra and Combat
(excerpts from Mahābhārata opera project)
for harp, percussion, electric guitar, electronics

From the famous epic and sacred book Mahabharata. A profound reflection on Hinduism as the basis from which the poem moves to offer a unique perspective on human existence and its myriad contradictory facets.

Composer Riccardo Nova reinterprets the Indian epic, bringing mantras, ancestral rhythms and contemporary sounds to the stage with effectiveness and balance. The work ‘Mahābhārata - Mantras, Fights and Threnody’ earned Riccardo Nova a nomination as a finalist for one of Europe's highest awards for composition, the ‘Prix Prince du Monaco’.

Canti dal Silenzio
by and with Marcello Fera
words as a double of musical discourse and the dual role of artistic director and musician

Program:

Marcello Fera: Segno, Andare,Taglio, Memento Gori, Sensa Sciou, Improvvisazione, Cura, Ragionando
Domenico Gabrielli [1650-1690]: Ricercare primo
From the Kroměříž Manuscript [1672]: Giga e Variatio
J.S. Bach [1685-1750] : Double [from Partita No. 1 in B minor BWV 1002]
Marcello Fera: Ninna per Olga
All’intorno, Interludio alla voce di Roberta Dapunt, Mnemo, Aframunda

There is something unknowable and at the same time familiar about a piece of music. Like in a mystery to be deciphered. Marcello Fera presents with this programme his new CD Piccoli Arcani
(Small Arcana)

Music by
Marcello Fera
 

50 composers in one programme, each represented by a piece of just over or just under one minute. Each composition a poetic world

Rameau, J.S.Bach, Haydn,Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Czerny, Rossini, Schumann, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, Verdi, Wagner, Saint-Saëns, Gounod, Massenet, Chabrier, Tchaikovsky, Fauré, Grieg, Bizet, Godowsky, Scriabin, De Falla, Debussy, Milhaud, Gershwin, Ravel, Strawinsky, Puccini, Poulenc, Hindemith, Prokofiev, Messiaen, Stockhausen, Françaix, Young, Castiglioni, Feldman, Villa-Lobos, Castaldi, Ligeti, Cage, Berio, Adams, Canino, Sciarrino, Lucchetti, Crumb

Philipp Lamprecht makes a musical excursus through texts and music from and related to the Nibelungenlied (13th century)

in collaboration with Merano Arte and the Merano Academy for the exhibition I M A G I N E W O R L D S as part of the initiative NIBELUNGEN: die Rückkehr - the returnPilipp Lamprecht - voce e organo portativo medioevale

Beyond the surface of appearance, verse retains something of the poetry that surrounds and inhabits us. We know it and therefore re-know it expressed in words. In this concert, the poetics of Tormis' music and the setting to music of Roberta Dapunt's poetry

Ottorino Respighi: Antiche arie e danze per liuto – Terza suite
Traditional (arr. M.Fera): Levar di tavola
Velijo Tormis: Melancholy Songs  (italian premiere)
Marcello Fera : Della carne e della lingua, five songs on lyrics by Roberta Dapunt  (italian premiere)

a portrait of two extraordinary artists, told in word and music

Joaquín Turina: Círculo Op. 91

Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel: Trio in D Minor, Op. 11

The Nibelungen manuscripts found just a stone's throw from Italy, Wagner's visit to Rossini, who as a boy was known as 'the little German'; or the strange entanglements between Nordic myths and the Mediterranean

G. Rossini: Il signor Bruschino - Ouverture
W.A. Mozart: Die Zauberflöte - Ouverture
E.T.A. Hoffmann: Das Kreuz an der Ostsee – Ouverture
R. Wagner: Siegfried Idyll
G. Rossini: Guillaume Tell - Ouverture

Il Canto di Circe
Music by Claudio Lugo
from Cantus Circaeus by Giordano Bruno. First performance (commissioned by the Festival)
in addition, pieces by Claudio Monteverdi, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Giulio Caccini, Marcello Fera

Music for a special audience, half an hour of concert time, a duration suitable for children under 4 and their parents. Families will have a changing room at their disposal, a dedicated parking space for prams, and, for the little ones, the opportunity to move freely in the hall, clap their hands, give free rein to their emotions without fear of disturbing anyone, and certainly... scream with joy! 
On the programme is music reflecting the scents and flavours of the Mediterranean, elaborated by the creative hand of Nicola Segatta. Duration: 35 minutes

Music for a special audience, half an hour of concert time, a duration suitable for children under 4 and their parents. Families will have a changing room at their disposal, a dedicated parking space for prams, and, for the little ones, the opportunity to move freely in the hall, clap their hands, give free rein to their emotions without fear of disturbing anyone, and certainly... scream with joy! 
On the programme is music reflecting the scents and flavours of the Mediterranean, elaborated by the creative hand of Nicola Segatta. Duration: 35 minutes

The worlds of childhood
I. Stravinsky - Eight miniatures for instruments (version for strings by M. Fera)
Anonymous - Symphony of Toys
W.A.Mozart - Galimathias Musicum
M.Ravel - Ma mère l'oye. Five children's pieces inspired by the tales of Perrault, Madame d'Aulnoy and Madame Leprince de Beaumont. (version for strings by M. Fera)

Tierkreis/Zodiac
by Karlheinz Stockhausen
A performance by I Burattini di Luciano Gottardi

Dedicated to Christian Martinelli
Shigeru Umebayashi - Yumeji's theme and Icaros of the Shipibo people (Amazonia) for Christian Martinelli with a video projection of his works by Marcello Fera and Andrea Pizzini
W.A.Mozart - Piano Concerto No. 12 in A major K 414
I. Strawinsky - Pulcinella, suite for orchestra

Performance by Conductus musicians in front of the works in the exhibition incontrare Christian Martinelli begegnen

Duration: 30 min