Livorno Music Festival 2024

The Livorno Friends of Music Association presents the detailed schedule of concerts of the Fourteenth Edition of the Livorno Music Festival, organized by the Friends of Music Association, artistic director Maestro Vittorio Ceccanti, supported by the Municipality of Livorno and the State Conservatory of Music “P. Mascagni” and with the contribution of the Ministry of Culture, the Livorno Foundation, Castagneto Banca 1910, and the Tuscany Region (CLICK HERE FOR THE MASTERCLASS AND COURSES CALENDAR).
Numerous collaborations: Piaggio Foundation, ISIS Niccolini Palli, Fiesole School of Music Foundation, Mascagni Festival, Contempoartensemble, Ente Concerti di Suvereto, Sifare Classical and the patronage of the Province of Livorno and the MTS Port System Authority.
From August 7 to September 1, 2024, in 26 days, the Livorno Music Festival will realize 24 concerts with 132 artists from 26 different countries including 83 young talents, in addition to many other young musicians as part of the Orchestra of the State Conservatory of Music “P. Mascagni”, in seven culturally significant locations in the historic and artistic heritage of the city of Livorno as well as performances in Suvereto and Pontedera. There will also be 32 high-level instrumental and musical interpretation courses, promoting international cultural exchanges and the training of young musicians of all ages and nationalities.

Artistic director Vittorio Ceccanti’s words: “On behalf of the Livorno Friends of Music Association, I am happy to present the concert schedule of the fourteenth edition of the Livorno Music Festival, which boasts even higher numbers than the previous edition, with 5 more advanced courses and 3 more concerts. Also, there are more concert opportunities for talented Italian and foreign musicians, with 83 young talents selected out of over 300 applicants to the Masterclasses. The calendar of events is of a very high international profile, with almost all productions created specifically for the Festival, with a strong focus on chamber music repertoires, a main element of musical sharing that is close to the heart of the Festival, paying tribute to important anniversaries (Gabriel Fauré, Giacomo Puccini, Ferruccio Busoni, Arnold Schönberg, Luigi Nono, Francesco Petrarca, Enrico Berlinguer), and featuring innovative programs characterized by genre contamination. The focus on new generations has always been the main mission of the Festival. Ensuring young people a combination of a highly educational experience and a professional concert experience with highly qualified artists, inserting them into the concert program in chamber formations, is an extraordinary stimulus for human and musical growth and creates a real “music workshop”, a workshop that also becomes a “family”, where synergies and friendships are born, an example for a better civil society that we strongly need.

32 masterclasses, 38 teachers, 26 days of lessons at the Livorno Music Festival. And in parallel, every day (except Mondays) from August 7 to September 1, a series of 24 superb concerts, each specifically designed for the Festival and therefore only available in Livorno and not in many other national festivals as is usually the case for almost all other events in the sector. Protagonists: 49 Italian and international artists of great international career, 83 young Italians and foreigners among instrumentalists and singers, performing as soloists, in chamber groups, in a saxophone orchestra, for a total of 132 artists plus around thirty young members of the Orchestra of the State Conservatory of Music “P. Mascagni”, a new presence at this year’s festival that marks further development of synergy with the Conservatory of the city. This is the formula of the Festival: passing on the baton among generations of musicians not only during classroom lessons, but through direct dialogue on stage, a space that becomes an aggregator of diverse experiences, of different ways of understanding music, which, however, with discussion and exchange of ideas during rehearsals, must harmonize in a common vision.
Illustrious names of the artists: soloists with vast international careers, first parts of major European orchestras, professors from the major academies of the continent. Programs that expand widely between epochs and genres, from baroque to present day. And collaborations with other cultural entities in the area, such as the Mascagni Conservatory, Mascagni Festival, Niccolini Palli High School, Piaggio Museum in Pontedera, Ente Concerti di Suvereto, Fiesole School of Music Foundation, Contempoartensemble, and Sifare Classical.

The fourteenth edition of the Livorno Music Festival opens on August 7 at the Fortezza Vecchia, on the Cisterna stage, with the Cineconcert Arrivederci Berlinguer! to tell a happy combination; that of music and film for which a composition was specially created by Massimo Zamboni, Italian guitarist, singer-songwriter, and writer, also guitarist and main composer of CCCP and subsequent CSI who is considered one of the fathers of Italian punk rock and alternative rock musically. The film portrays Berlinguer as present, intense, and human. The social and political portrait is always punctually and vividly outlined, never mannered or pathetic. Dedicated to everyone, especially those who did not know him. The film is directed by Michele Mellara and Alessandro Rossi. On stage, Cristiano Roversi on keyboards and programming, Erik Montanari on guitars and vocals, along with Massimo Zamboni on vocals and guitar.

On Thursday, August 8, a exceptional piano recital by Louis Lortie, a world-renowned concert pianist who won first prize at the International Piano Competition Ferruccio Busoni in 1984. The Natural History Museum is the perfect setting for the shifting melodies of one of the most prominent figures connecting romanticism and modernity: Gabriel Faure. In the pieces that will be performed on the piano in the shade of the whale skeleton in the fascinating Mediterranean room, a sonic tapestry is created that will ferry the listener through an aquatic rollercoaster of fluid harmonies and dissonances. The program is completed with tributes to the French composer by contemporary musicians like Aubert, Ravel, and others.

The Festival continues on the 9th in the lively and vital crowd of Livorno’s Central Market, where the melodic virtuosity of Giuliani meets Fauré’s dreamy travels, Mozart, with passionate and stylistically complex dialogue between piano and flute (originally violin), and closing with the Andante et Rondò by Austrian flutist Franz Doppler, famous for his duets for flutes. This concert will thrill you, performed by the very young flute star Alberto Navarra (internationally awarded at the Severino Gazzelloni and Carl Nielsen solo competitions in 2021 and 2022), the guitarist Andrea Dieci, concert performer and teacher at the Modena Conservatory, the pianist Eugenio Milazzo, and some international young talents.

Another appointment at the Natural History Museum on August 10. This time the piano takes center stage, around which revolve Bach’s selected pieces with his splendid Italian Concerto, famous for its alternation between soft and loud that recreate the musical dialogue between various instruments as in a true orchestra performance. Followed by Chopin’s Scherzo, with strong dramatic and emotional connotations, and Shostakovich’s melancholic and fascinating Sonata, closing with Beethoven and the trio version of his famous septet in E-flat major, very challenging for the three musicians with a more soloistic rendition than the original. All performed by a small group of musicians composed of two promising young pianists, the clarinetist Giovanni Riccucci from the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the cello by Gabriele Geminiani, concert performer and teacher at the Rossini Conservatory in Pesaro, and the piano by Alessandro Deljavan, a international talent and teacher at the Umberto Giordano Conservatory in Foggia.

Sunday, August 11, at 6 am a group of musicians composed of the cellists Geminiani and Di Tonno (professor at the conservatory of Piacenza and cellist of the Klimt Quartet), the piano of Silvia Da Boit (renowned chamber musician and concert performer), and young talents of the Festival, will play their greeting to the rising day. At dawn, music shines together with the rising sun, reflected on the waters surrounding the historic and mighty Fortezza Vecchia by Antonio da Sangallo, an innovative masterpiece of military architecture from the 1500s. Each piece in the concert greets the sun in its daily birth, ranging from piano and voice chants, to a solo guitar piece, to two piano solo pieces, all dedicated to the dawn, ending with a string ensemble composition by Samuel Barber, a piece made legendary by Oliver Stone’s Platoon film, when the sun has already risen above Livorno.

The Festival will continue on Sundays, in the evening at 9 pm with the voice of mezzo-soprano Manuela Custer, who has performed on the stages of the best international theaters, along with the guitar of Andrea Dieci, the double bass of Anita Mazzantini (double bass at Santa Cecilia), the piano of Silvia Da Boit, the Klimt Quartet (well-known and prestigious chamber music ensemble at an international level), and a handful of young musicians. The voice is the undisputed protagonist of this evening, echoing in the cavernous and epic Cannoniera of the Fortezza Vecchia, ranging from Britten to Schubert, from Poulenc to Fauré, featuring a colorful program focused on song form and the contamination between folkloric tradition and modernity. «Only those who accept their loneliness and reject all kinds of refuge – tribal nationalism or hermetic intellectual systems – will carry forward the human heritage» (Benjamin Britten).

On Tuesday, August 13, Simone Librale on piano, Cosimo Profita on clarinet, and the talented young Duo Nami, composed of two cellists, will perform for the first time the compositions inspired by the lyrics of Francesco Petrarca, on the occasion of the 650th anniversary of his death, created by eight young composers specifically for the occasion.
“Here have I come, and when? Believing that I arrived in paradise, and not where I was. Since then I love this green grass so much that I cannot find peace in any other place. Song, if you were as beautiful and adorned as you aspire to be in describing what you talk about, you could boldly and shamelessly leave this wooded valley and go among the people, to make yourself known and listened to.”

On the evening of the 14th, it’s time for the Klimt Quartet, assisted by the double bass of Anita Mazzantini and two promising young musicians.
Ironically suited, the Natural History Museum is the perfect place to musically narrate the events of an unfortunate trout that, throughout the five movements, after various adventures ends up biting the hook of a fisherman. The quintet, written by Schubert at just twenty-two years old but published in 1829, a year after his death, contains an extraordinary synthesis of the musical genius of the Austrian composer, so much so that Franz Liszt said about it: “The greatest poet in music that has ever existed.”

On the Cisterna stage of the Fortezza Vecchia on Thursday, August 15, a recital in the style of Italian singer-songwriters will take place, where the voice, giving strength to a happy selection of some of the most famous Italian songwriter songs of the 20th century, is entrusted to the skillful piano keys of Ilio Barontini, a renowned musician from Livorno with over fifty years of career, in a sequence of emotions and innovations that will leave you with something important inside, we are sure.

The Stradivari violin Conte de Fontana of Pavel Berman, a virtuoso concert performer and teacher in Lugano, the cello of Vittorio Ceccanti, artistic director of the Festival, concert performer and teacher at the Florence Conservatory, and the piano of Chong Park, an international concert performer and head of the piano department at Yonsei University in Seoul, will resonate in the medieval village of Suvereto on Friday, August 16. The village carries the typical bittersweet taste of places where History has been built century after century, with a scent that still envelops every stone that constructs it. The Cloister of San Francesco is totally imbued with this essence: dating back to 1200, built in imposing limestone, in the evening it fills with atmosphere and is the ideal setting for a monographic concert on Beethoven, and particularly for the Trio called Gli Spettri. Subdued, melancholic, unreal, suspended, full of tension. The second movement (out of three) reaches the peak of this musical language (and the innovation compared to Beethoven’s poetics), where the exaggerated slowness and methodical fragmentation of the themes create an atmosphere that shudders and makes shudder, ethereal and almost supernatural.

The wind instruments come from the last rows of the orchestra and become the protagonists on the evening of August 17 amidst the books of the Olive Bottini Library, where a team of young wind instruments led by the flutist Jurgen Franz (from the NDR Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg), the bassoon of Paolo Carlini (first bassoon of the ORT) and the pianist Eugenio Milazzo will tackle a series of pieces taken from famous works by Rossini and Verdi and others inspired by arias and operatic themes. All reworked by contemporary composers of international standing, for an event that will transport you among the stages of a theater.

Again at the Natural History Museum on August 18, for a piano duo of exceptional concert performers, Tatiana Larionova and Davide Cabassi, who will tackle some of Brahms’s twenty-one Hungarian Dances, one of his early works, incredibly passionate and perfectly in line with the Hungarian folkloric sound, dear to the composer. Small gems of creativity and vivacity. Schubert’s Fantasia is pure imaginative poetry, fully romantic without ever falling into pathos, but full of subjective feelings of lyrical affection. Schumann’s Oriental-tinged, distant, atmospheric improvisations recall a journey to places with spicy and alien flavors, mysterious and dreamy, full of poetic and literary citations. The nostalgic, intimate, delicate, and melancholic Andantino by Schubert opens the evening in an ideal manner.

On August 20, at the Cannoniera, a concert of extraordinarily expressive melodies in the name of romanticism will take place. With the viola of Anna Serova, soloist in the most prestigious concert halls in the world and 5 young Italian and foreign talents. We start with Schumann’s 5 pieces, where inventive freshness and intimate charm are perfectly distilled in an exemplary blend, with the taste typical of Hausmusik. Then comes Franck and his Sonata in A major, one of his last masterpieces, where instrumental purity and Apollonian balance govern the dialogue between the two instruments. Last but not least, Brahms’s Sonata in F minor op.120, the composer’s last chamber music composition, intimate, clear, poetic, and complex. Works that “reject all externality, […] grant nothing to virtuosity: works written for oneself, like pages of a diary,” as Rostand said.

The mezzo-soprano Alda Caiello (one of the major interpreters in the European panorama for versatility, sophistication, and expressive capabilities), soprano Maria Eleonora Caminada (prominent representative of contemporary vocal artistry), and pianist Alfonso Alberti (concert performer and dedicated performer of compositions by the greatest contemporary composers, writer, poet) meet Schönberg, Ligeti, Busoni, Nono, Fauré, Mascagni, and Puccini: the 20th century breaks out at the Natural History Museum on Wednesday, August 21, with a program dedicated to voice and piano. An unmissable experience of artistic connection and innovation, where the artists of the Livorno Music Festival and the Mascagni Academy weave the soundscapes of fundamental composers of the historical contemporary scene, on the anniversaries of their birthdays. In collaboration with the Mascagni Festival.

In the Church of San Ferdinando, called Crocetta, by the great architect Giovan Battista Foggini, Mendelssohn’s melodies intertwine with Beethoven’s for a concert of special intensity with Eva Bindere, first violin of Gidon Kremer’s Kremerata Baltica, Anna Serova, and some young talents. Beethoven’s Op.9 Trio opens the dances outlining that divine (because difficult to reach) balance between the three leading instruments, so close in range, where the musical conversation does not allow any one to dominate over the others. Musical alchemy that is rarely enjoyed. The Quintet is elegiac, devoid of any mannerism, keeps the listener anchored to the seat (or ecclesiastical bench) and doesn’t let go until the end with its incisive rhythm and consistently formal elegance that is concrete and never superficial.

On the Cisterna stage of the Fortezza Vecchia on Thursday, August 29, a recital in the style of Italian singer-songwriters, but with a twist—the voice belongs to the skillful pianist Maurizio Baglini (Tuscan pianist engaged in an extraordinary executive, educational, organizational activity) and the young Paolo Ehrenheim. A sequence of pieces chosen to take you on a journey through the expressive imaginary evoked by the surprising language of the refined and whimsical romantic composer. Between pictures of the Orient, full of literary suggestions and references; the Arabeske, flashes of brief images and delicate dreamy poetic atmospheres; the Carnaval, with a fantastic and imaginative flavor, up to the Bunte Blatter, the colorful leaves, short and varied, truly evoking autumn and its chromatic tones, with a nostalgic and personal undertone.

“The flute – Instrument chosen by Pan to disturb emotions, with its Dionysian melodies. Born from the body of the nymph Syrinx, whom the sylvan god loved and who, to escape his savage embrace, fell into a pond and drowned. The reeds in the water chirped the mourning cry of the young woman. From them, to always have her with him, Pan made an instrument in which to blow and listen once again to the voice of his lost beloved.” The concert taking place on Saturday, August 24 in the Cannoniera at the Fortezza Vecchia, featuring executants Alice Morzenti (one of Italy’s most active and qualified flute players of her generation), Eugenio Milazzo on piano, and a group of young flutes is dedicated to the flute; a symbol of pastoral, bucolic, melancholic nature of Arcadia. An ideal place surrounded by greenery where everyone can live in peace and in harmony with the state of nature.

A lineup of Bach, Debussy, Ysaye, Liszt, Saint-Saens, Stravinsky dedicated to virtuosity in music for a heterogeneous group of musicians formed by Xenia Jankovic (exceptional cellist, teacher in Detmold), Angela Pan