Ravenna Festival lights up the Christmas season by unveiling (and putting on presale) five 2026 events. This constellation of events that lets audiences begin dreaming of the Festival’s 37th edition, whose full program will be presented on Saturday, February 7 at the Alighieri Theatre, features a concert led by Riccardo Muti at the Pala De André with his Cherubini Orchestra (June 30), while the opening concert is scheduled for May 21, with Anne-Sophie Mutter as soloist alongside the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko. The summer calendar will continue through July 12: while Murmuration Level2, the hypnotic choreography by Sadeck Berrabah (June 12), awaits audiences at the Pala De André, it is time to return to the Rocca Brancaleone, a historic Festival’s venue, with an all-stars jazz evening featuring Stefano Bollani, Enrico Rava, Paolo Fresu, Roberto Gatto, and others (June 6), and with Fantasia in Concert Live to Film, featuring the Cherubini Orchestra conducted by Thiago Tiberio in the soundtrack of highlights from the beloved Disney classics ‘Fantasia’ and ‘Fantasia 2000’, projected on a large screen (July 6). With Ravenna Festival 2026, two much-loved segments of the programme are also renewed: Romagna in fiore and the Autumn Trilogy. The eco-sustainable, widespread Romagna in fiore returns from May 1 to 24, over four weekends of open-air concerts in green spaces across Romagna, while the Trilogy – entitled Mozart 1791 – will take place at the Teatro Alighieri from November 13 to 17. The project Cantare amantis est returns for its second edition: on June 1 and 2 it will bring together choristers from all over Italy for two days of lessons and rehearsals with Maestro Muti (information to be announced by the end of January).
Tickets for the five events can be purchased in presale at the Teatro Alighieri Box Office, by phone (+39 (0)544 249244), online (ravennafestival.org), through the Vivaticket circuit, at La Cassa di Ravenna Spa branches, and at the IAT offices in Ravenna and Cervia. The Carnet Open formula, starting from a minimum of four events of your choice, offers a 15% discount on tickets.
Thursday, May 21, the opening concert of the 37th edition marks the return to Ravenna of Anne-Sophie Mutter, alongside the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra led by its music director Vasily Petrenko. The impeccable technique and interpretive depth cultivated by Anne-Sophie Mutter over an extraordinary career – since Karajan invited her to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic at just thirteen years old – will do justice to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, which the violinist recorded with her legendary mentor. The program is completed by Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, which he began writing in his villa on a lake in Carinthia, shortly before the fateful meeting with Alma Schindler.
Saturday, June 6, the Festival returns to the Rocca Brancaleone with an event perfectly in tune with the long performance history of the ancient Venetian fortress, returned to citizens and visitors after a major restoration and enhancement project. Stefano Bollani All Stars is an all-jazz evening that sees the eclectic and irrepressible genius of Stefano Bollani in conversation with acknowledged heroes of Italian jazz, from trumpeters Enrico Rava and Paolo Fresu to drummer Roberto Gatto, from accordionist Antonello Salis to saxophonist Daniele Sepe and bassist Ares Tavolazzi, as well as the new generation represented by guitarists Matteo Mancuso and Christian Mascetta and by singer and pianist Frida Bollani. The concert will be preceded by the screening of Tutta vita, the documentary film by Valentina Cenni that portrays the artists during a musical residency in a house-studio and was presented at the Rome Film Festival.
Friday, June 12, in its Italian premiere at the Pala De André, Murmuration Level2 is a hypnotic journey across the geometric and visionary world of choreographer Sadeck Berrabah, whose shows were also applauded at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. With dozens of bodies moving like a single organism, driven by the powerful sounds of TRex, the performance transforms the stage into a vast moving design made of lines, circles, and human waves that assemble and dissolve before the audience’s eyes: the effect is that of a true “murmuration,” like a flock of birds changing direction in unison, amid explosions of energy and moments of almost meditative suspension.
Tuesday, June 30, Riccardo Muti takes the podium, leading his Cherubini Orchestra at the Pala De André in a programme that opens under the double sign of Verdi, with the dramatic intensity of the Sinfonia from Nabucco and “The Four Seasons” from I vespri siciliani, a ballet sequence inserted in the third act and endowed with great descriptive imagination in a richly colored orchestral writing. The dialogue with ballet continues with Suite No. 2 from The Three-Cornered Hat, which Manuel de Falla – whose 150th anniversary of birth falls in 2026 – composed inspired by a Spanish folk tale for his collaboration with the Ballets Russes. To conclude the evening, the inexorable crescendo of Ravel’s Boléro, built on an unchanging dance rhythm and the progressive expansion of the orchestration.
Monday, July 6, Fantasia in Concert is a feature film of highlights from two of Disney’s most extraordinary and revolutionary animated films: ‘Fantasia’ and its sequel ‘Fantasia 2000’. The live music will be performed by the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra – conducted for the occasion by Thiago Tiberio, a specialist in film music: from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony to Debussy’s Clair de lune, from Amilcare Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours to Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance, Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and more. The event is produced by Disney Concerts, a division of Disney Music Group (part of The Walt Disney Company), which has presented events in most prominent concert halls around the world, from the Lincoln Center to the Royal Albert Hall, from the Sydney Opera House to the Hollywood Bowl and the Tokyo Forum.
Ravenna Festival 2026 is made possible by the support of the Ministry of Culture, the Emilia-Romagna Region, the Municipality of Ravenna, and the Association of Friends of Ravenna Festival, with the main partner Eni and all the supporters of the Festival.
Info and presales: +39 (0)544 249244 www.ravennafestival.org
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