{"id":18015,"date":"2020-02-20T12:06:25","date_gmt":"2020-02-20T11:06:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravennafestival.org\/?p=18015"},"modified":"2020-02-20T12:06:25","modified_gmt":"2020-02-20T11:06:25","slug":"festival2019-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravennafestival.org\/en\/festival2019-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Sweet Colour of the Oriental Sapphire – 31st edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sweet Colour of the Oriental Sapphire<\/em> (Purgatorio <\/em>I, 13)<\/strong><\/span>
\n31st edition from June 3 to July 19<\/p>\n

Dante\u2019s idea of \u201cthe East\u201d shared many traits of Byzantine Ravenna. This is a fact, not a suggestion, and traces are profusely scattered through Dante\u2019s verses, as many distinguished scholars have shown. This East maintained a dense network of relationships with the Medieval West, trading ideas as well as goods, treaties, scientific texts, translations of the Greek classics from Arabic into Latin, travel accounts, or the tales of wayfarers, monks and pilgrims. The same East was\u2014quite ironically\u2014brought closer to the West by the wars of conquest and the crusades, whose battlefields became opportunities for mutual knowledge, confrontation and hybridization. And this East had its own preferred way of knowledge, to be found in the arts, and embodied in the basilicas and the mosaics. We like to think\u2014and it would not be unlikely!\u2014that Dante\u2019s \u201csweet\u201d, \u201csapphire-blue\u201d sky was inspired by the starry vault of the mausoleum of Galla Placidia, or that the pure, fresh air that delighted the Poet\u2019s sight and breast in Purgatory<\/em>, Canto I, was the very air he breathed on our shores, his gaze fixed on the East. (More than six centuries later, another poet, Eugenio Montale, would be similarly oriented<\/em>, and refer to Ravenna in his poem Dora Markus<\/em> as the place \u201c…where an ancient life \/ Blends into a mellow \/ Oriental anxiety\u201d.)<\/p>\n

This luminous and bright theme, chosen with a view to the approaching celebrations for the 7th<\/sup> centenary of Dante\u2019s death in 2021, will be matched by a darker and more disturbing image, which marks a distance to that ancient and fabulous East: our minds and hearts will turn to the people of Syria, murdered and forced into exile, and the Roads of Friendship<\/em><\/strong> concert, that Riccardo Muti had conducted in the Ancient Roman Theatre at Bosra, near Damascus and Aleppo, in 2004, will be \u201cFor Syria\u201d, and dedicated to Hevrin Khalaf. The 35-year-old Secretary General of the Future Syria Party, an activist for women’s rights and the Kurdish liberation movement, and a worker towards increasing tolerance and unity among Christians, Arabs, and Kurds, was brutally killed in an ambush on the road connecting Ras al-Ayn to Qamishli, in north-eastern Syria, in October 2019.<\/p>\n

In our time, when daily reports constantly inform us on the damage that human neglect causes to the most valuable of our assets, the environment, we are also painfully aware that the overwhelming fascination Dante experienced and expressed in its earthly-paradise purity might be definitely and irreparably lost. Insatiable greed and wickedness made the air of Dante\u2019s Hell<\/em> unbearable, an \u201cair of death\u201d: can they now also poison the air, seas and rivers of our Mother Earth forever? Can they burn down our natural rainforests\u2014imposing, cathedral-like and sacred in their majesty?<\/p>\n

The Festival\u2019s theme thus becomes a sort of meditation on Man\u2019s threefold nature\u2014divine<\/em>, human<\/em> and diabolical<\/em>\u2014which, once again with a reference to Dante\u2019s vast universe, will form the thematic core of the Autumn Trilogy<\/strong>. After an opening entrusted to an outside-the-box \u00e9toile<\/em> like Sergei Polunin, the Trilogy will continue with Mozart’s Don Giovanni<\/em> and Gounod’s Faust<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As for the Festival\u2019s XXXI edition, it will open with a XX-century milestone, Philip Glass\u2019s Koyaanisqatsi<\/em>, and close with the Italian exclusive of the spectacular Carmina Burana<\/em> by La Fura dels Baus, and with a Ballet Gala in tribute to Alicia Alonso. The Festival\u2019s ballet and dance programme features the world premi\u00e8re of Johan Inger\u2019s new creation as well as Opera Ballet Vlaanderen and the Hofesh Shechter Company. As for music, conductors Ivan Fischer and Valerij Gergiev will also be on the Festival\u2019s podium. Eclecticism will be the watchword for the events featuring Vinicio Capossela, Stefano Bollani, Neri Marcor\u00e8, and the 100 Cellos led by Giovanni Sollima and Enrico Melozzi. If the basilica of Sant\u2019Apollinare Nuovo provides a stage for Paul Hillier and his Theatre of Voices, San Vitale will host a new series of daily Vespers <\/em>at 7pm. Also, the Young Artists for Dante<\/em> section will return to the Franciscan cloisters, next to the Poet\u2019s Tomb, at 11am, daily.<\/p>\n

Discover all the events<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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