Stresa Festival 2024

Stresa Festival 2024

A musical archipelago made up of various islands, like all the types of music on today’s stages: “jazz”, “classic”, “antiqua” and the multifaceted “young”. In the midst of all this is a wood bearing the name of Claudio Abbado, who we remember ten years from his death, and to whom Stresa Festival, one of the most prestigious summer music events internationally, is dedicated this year.

Mario Brunello, Artistic Director of Stresa Festival, remembers him vividly: “Claudio

Abbado was a true visionary, a rare Maestro always looking toward the future.   He traced out numerous paths and has left just as many open for the music to come: “Abbado always managed to reconcile the figure of the artiste with that of a socially committed person, and one of the paths he combines  – and that Stresa Festival wants to follow – takes us into the world of Nature, with respect for the planet, convinced that music too has its part.” Brunello concludes: “Stresa Festival is bringing to life one of Abbado’s visions, planting a whole new wood dedicated to the Maestro in the Parco Campo dei Fiori, on the other side of Lake Maggiore. The first trees are already there, and with the help of our public we can plant a lovely big wood”.

Brunello’s artistic vision for the Festival spreads once again this year over several “musical islands, crossed with great Music, and will ambitiously join in enriching the beauties that the regions of Stresa and Lago Maggiore offer to audiences and the artistes.”

The program for the 63rd edition of Stresa Festival is divided, as usual, into two parts. From 16 to 28 July the focus will be on the piano, with jazz and borderline music;  then from 17 August to 6 September it moves from early music to contemporary numbers. 
Young artistes, some from the local region, are given ample space.  

Concerts will be held in various places. The Palazzo dei Congressi is now known as the Stresa Festival Hall;  there is the Catapult, the stage prop designed by architect Michele De Lucchi on the Lungolago La Palazzola, the garden of Villa Bossi at Orta and the island of San Giulio,  Villa Ponti in Arona, the Eremo di Santa Caterina del Sasso hermitage in the cliff at Leggiuno, the Isola Madre, Villa Bryner in Lesa, Sant’Ambrogio church in Stresa, and the Bosco Sonoro – the Wood of Sound – at Gignese, where the ‘young’ events will take place.

Jazz and other music from 16 to 28 July
The July concerts start off with two strong personalities, Egberto Gismonti and Ludovico Einaudi, quite different, who can be viewed as emblems of ‘music that feeds on all sorts of music’:. The highly original Brazilian pianist and guitar player – the first on stage, on Tuesday 16 July in the Catapulta, always occupies a space somewhere between jazz and classical music, with his own use of amazonic traditional music.

 Ludovico Einaudi, who we shall hear on 17 July in Stresa Festival Hall, proposes his In A Time Lapse Reimagined, looking back ten years at when his luckiest album came out,  ‘re-imaginating it’ with a different ensemble of instruments.

Focused more closely on jazz, on 19 July  there will be a trio starring the local musician Simone Locarni, whose talent has already earned  him recognition and important awards, the latest being the 14th European Young Artists Jazz Award from Burghausen in Germany.

Another ‘exported’ Italian talent is the sax player Luigi Grasso, who will be playing on 20 July together with the one of the most interesting European pianists of his generation, the German  Florian Weber.  The next day is the turn of another German group.  The spectacular German Jazzrausch Bigband, plays a special tribute, between orchestral jazz and dance rhythms, to the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner.  This year is the bicentenary of his birth, and Stresa is marking it with several items.

In July there are three  “young” appointments, all in the Wood of Sound in Gignese. On the 24th there will be an American guitar player, Trace Bundy, a specialist on the six-string acoustic instrument.  On 2 July we shall hear the talented singer and songwriter from Catania, Anna Castiglia. Then on the 26th comes Krisma TV, projext thought up by Bienoise a composer for electronic music, with the vocalist Olga Condry and the video artist Fabio Brusadin, who will be celebrating the anomalous new wave imagined by Christina Moser and Maurizio Arcieri, with the Krisma, well-known among Italian electropop bands.

Completing the July program, on Saturday 26 and Sunday 28 July at Orta a trammaturgic reduction for string quartet and singers will be staged, of Mozart’s much-loved Le nozze di Figaro,  directed by Gianmaria Aliverta, who for more than 12 years now has been  travelling the world, with VoceAllOpera, showing off this new way to stage opera.

“Isola antiqua” and “isola classic” from 17 August to 6 September
The 63rd edition of Stresa Festival, in its traditional form, will start with a concert by the Giardino Armonico, a prestigious baroque music ensemble led by Giovanni Antonini.   For this occasion, the Russian violinist Dmitry Smirnov  will play music by Haydn and Vivaldi. That will be followed the next day by the instrumental group La Tempête, founded and conducted by Simon-Pierre Bestion. They will present Vespro, A Jubilant Sound Experience, based on Monteverdi’s masterpiece Vespro della Beata Vergine.   This promises listeners a sensory immersion centered on powerful sound material.

On Monday 19 August, in Villa Ponti in Arona, the program offers a duo, with  Teodoro Baù (viola da gamba) and Andrea Buccarella (harpsichord). We shall hear music by Corelli, Bach and Händel.

On 21 and 22 August, in the captivating setting of the Hermitage of Santa Caterina del Sasso overlooking Lake Maggiore at Leggiuno the Hungarian cellist Ditta Rohmann will interpret the traditional ‘meditations’  on Bach’s cello suites

A special idea marking the beginning of the isola classic program, a co-production with Ravenna Festival e Opera Estate and the Festival di Bassano del Grappa, is Un amico, a tribute to the world of music of  Ezio Bosso, stemming from the unusual collaboration of the cellist Mario Brunello, Maria Semeraro on the piano, and Virgilio Sieni ‘s dance company (on the 4th).

Stresa Festival 2024’s rich program will include the Russian Yulianna Avdeeva (25 August), winner in 2010 of the Warsaw Chopin contest.  Her program will combine Chopin and Prokofiev. The mezzosoprano Isabel Pfefferkorn will sing with a quartet of cellos on the Isola Madre on Tuesday 27 August.  Their broad repertoire ranges from Purcell to Richard Strauss, Piazzolla to the Queens and Adele.

On 28 August the British group, the Barbican Quartet, already appreciated in Stresa last year, returns with music by Purcell, Ravel and Beethoven.  On the 30th the

Norrlands Nations Kammarkörr conducted by Francesco Acquista,  a 34-voice choir,  will pay further homage to Anton Bruckner.

Another ensemble we are pleased to welcome back –one of the most important appointments of the 2024 edition – is the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, under their conductor Myung-Whun Chung, and the pianist Sir András Schiff, with a program of Beethoven and Brahms (31 August).

The September concerts start with the  Trio Chagall (on 1 September), with music by Haydn, Weinberg and Mendelssohn.  On September 3 the cellist Giovanni Sollima, at Villa Bryner in Lesa will tackle the barcassa, a very unusual musical instrument built on a real boat  (known locally as a nassarola) with three six-meter-long strings.

The last tribute to Bruckner will be paid on 4 September, by a string quartet that calls itself Illumina.  This project dates from 2015 in San Paolo del Brazil on an initiative of the American viola player Jennifer Stumm.  The aim was to involve young musicians with famous international artistes, in a widely known festival that gives thousands of people access to live music every year.

Stresa Festival, on 6 September, will be closed by the  Freiburg Baroque Orchestra with two outstanding soloists,  the violinist Isabelle Faust  and Kristian Bezuidenhout on the fortepiano.  They will play two of Beethoven’s masterpieces, the Concerto per violino and the Concerto per pianoforte no. 3.

There will be two afternoon meetings.  On 18 August the pianist and composer Luca Mosca will comment Monteverdi’s Vespro,  and on 6 September the music historian Alberto Batisti will discuss Beethoven’s concertos.

The partnerships at Stresa Festival 2024 include Outhere Music, one of the principal independent producers of classical and contemporary music in the world. Several of their artistes have been invited.

Stresa, July 2024