Musical America is the oldest American magazine on classical music. It is now a website – musicalamerica.com with a weekly online magazine.
Founded by John C. Freund in 1898 as a weekly newspaper covering drama, music and the arts, Musical America Worldwide today (Musical America International Directory of the Performing Arts, MusicalAmerica.com, and the weekly E-newsletter) is the meeting place for the international performing arts community.
With their annual Special Report on Festivals, they continue a Musical America tradition dating back at least 50 years of reporting on the year’s upcoming festivals.
As a complement to the listings in our annual Special Report on Summer Festivals, we thought we’d focus on ten of the lesser known—but worth the trip—festivals around the world. We put out feelers to our trusty contributors, and collectively they have come up with a splendid list of events that, we’d wager, you’ve never heard of. Italy’s Festival Opera Barga on your regular summer itinerary? How about the Shoton Festival in Tibet? Or the Northern Lights Music Festival in Aurora, Minnesota? Check them out….
• Baroque opera in the medieval walled city of Barga, Italy (Opera Barga)
• Al fresco dance by up-and-coming troupes in the Berkshires (Inside/Outside)
• An expanded drumming workshop in Setúbal, Portugal (Setúbal Music Festival)
• Chamber music on a 17th-century estate in West Cork, Ireland (West Cork Chamber Music Festival)
• Shostakovich in the Saxon Mountains (International Shostakovich Days Gohrisch)
• Sondheim in the Catskills (Phoenicia Festival of the Voice)
• And our personal favorite, Buddhist monks in Norbulingka, Tibet (Shoton Festival).
Opera Barga is based in the medieval walled city of Barga north of Lucca, nestled among the green hills of so-called ‘‘Tuscanyshire”—a local joke as many historic mansions and farmsteads have been bought by affluent Britons. The festival, too, is run by a British expat: actor- cum-stage-director Nicholas Hunt, whose parents Peter Hunt and Gillian Armitage founded the Festival in 1967 with the support of Italian-American music teacher Larry Malfatti and Peter Gellhorn, then director of the BBC and Glyndebourne choruses.
Its main venue is the 18th-century Teatro del Differenti, seating 289; further venues are drawn into service both in Barga proper (Chiostro del Conservatorio di S. Elisabetta) and in the villages of Bagnone and Cutigliano. Since its inception, the Festival’s mission has been to present rare Baroque operas alongside avant-garde works—often world premieres. Young artists are selected through audition and given the opportunity to perform with guest artists from the world over.
The centerpiece of the 2015 season is Catone (Cato), a “pasticcio opera” in three acts that Handel produced in 1732 for London’s King’s Theater, inserting arias by famed composers of his day such as Leonardo Leo, Antonio Vivaldi, Leonardo Vinci, Johann Adolf Hasse, and Nicola Porpora. A wealth of vocal and instrumental recitals will round up the Baroque section, including duets by Monteverdi, Haendel, and Bach sung by soprano Roberta Invernizzi and contralto Sonia Prina. Modern music performances will revolve around Sibelius and the “Progetto Inaudita” (literally: Unheard-of things) project, a series of ten premieres performed by the Ensemble Multilaterale and led by composers Francesco Filidei and Franck Bedrossian.
The festival is funded by the Regione Toscana (35,000 euros), the National Ministry for Culture and the banking foundation CariLucca (25,000 euros each). A fur- ther 40,000 euros comes in from coproductions with the resident period band, AuserMusici. Minor, yet treasured, contributions are offered by the City of Barga (10,000 euros) and sundry private donors, including 5,000 euros from crowdfunding.
Total assets are estimated around at 180,000 euros, largely invested in productions, artists’ salaries/expenses, and communication/marketing. Management goes unpaid, save for expenses. — Carlo vitali