The Piccolo Opera Festival is back with many new features, from June 19 to July 18, enriching the cultural and tourist offer of the Friuli Venezia Giulia summer program with its stimulating and unprecedented proposals. Now in its 14th edition , a consolidated appointment and also appreciated by foreign audiences, the festival directed by Gabriele Ribis is increasingly becoming a cross-border event and also embraces the Brda, included with the Collio in the UNESCO Heritage Tentative List. An original project able to offer an authentic " Opera Experience without borders ", between music, landscapes, places of extraordinary evocative power.
Music between nature and architecture
The Piccolo Opera Festival will therefore make places rich in history and art in Friuli Venezia Giulia and Slovenia resound with melodies, some of which are exceptionally open for the occasion. Castles, ancient residences, public and private historical gardens will be the suggestive stage for the shows and will have as a corollary guided tours, aperitifs, introductions to listening, tastings, walks in music . For an enveloping experience that will allow you to get to know not only the architecture, history, landscapes of these extraordinary borderlands, but also flavors and wines .
"Despite the problems linked to the pandemic, the 2021 edition is even richer in terms of both the number of shows and the locations - explains the artistic director Gabriele Ribis - A program that, despite everything, continues to open up more and more to collaborations international, especially when they constitute a ground for cultural exchange and educational experience.This is the spirit that animates the project of the Piccolo Opera Festival, which wants to become more and more borderless meeting space for new creativity, as a foundation on which to build a shared future.
24 appointments, 5 sections
The program is developed in 5 sections , each of which tells in music the places of the events (never as strongly representative as this year), superimposing suggestions, stories and emotions in an intertwining of sounds, landscapes, words, images and flavors. In all, 24 shows will be held.
New this year are the 8 events between music, nature and taste in the Collio, in the Brda and in the Colli Orientali: musical itineraries among the Italian and Slovenian vineyards interspersed with music and Concerts of taste with the involvement of local producers and tasting of wines.
The Opera
The heart of the program will be the Opera with two highly acclaimed titles, Don Pasquale by Gaetano Donizetti and the Opera tango Maria de Buenos Aires by Astor Piazzolla . The new production of Donizetti's comic masterpiece (in collaboration with the Bon Foundation and FVG Orchestra) will actually inaugurate the brand new and evocative Teatro di Verzura of the Castello di Spessa in Capriva del Friuli , a manor house that hosted the well-known librettist of Mozart Lorenzo da Ponte and Giacomo Casanova , and in the summer it becomes the home of opera in Friuli Venezia Giulia (29 June and 1 July). The staging will use natural light for most of the show with a lighting and scenic set-up that will not affect the visual continuity of the Collio landscape, which is intended to be maximized . Astor Piazzolla's Opera tango Maria de Buenos Aires (a tribute on the centenary of the author's birth in co-production with the Goldoni Theater of Livorno and Glasbena Matica), will be staged on 2 July in Vila Vipol¸e in Dobrovo in Slovenia and on 3 July at the Castle of San Giusto in Trieste: it is a show of great appeal, capable of attracting an audience not only of music lovers.
Circulata Melody
Also new is the Circulata Melodia section, or Dante in music. Three events to celebrate the 700th anniversary of the death of the Supreme Poet: Dante Symphonie by Franz Liszt in Piazza Capitolo in Aquileia (June 30), I heard a high horn sounding at the Ara Pacis Mundi in Medea (July 4), the silent cinema Inferno from 1911 with live musical accompaniment at the Rocca di Cormòns (9 July).
Among historical gardens, villas and castles
Five appointments in the Green Music section, or rather the popular musical visits to historic gardens and parks , which the public will discover together with the curators of the heritage and the owners of the residences. Created in collaboration with ERPAC and the Accademia per l'Opera di Verona / Polo Nazionale Artistico, this year it will be enriched with new prestigious locations, including the park of the Miramare Castle in Trieste where the baroque serenade Marc'Antonio and Cleopatra will be represented with the participation of the Schlesinger Chamber Orchestra of the City of Kragujevac (Serbia).
Finally, four concerts in the Castelli in Aria section, in homage to 4 anniversaries: the centenary of the death of the famous tenor Enrico Caruso, the birth of the tenors Franco Corelli and Mario Lanza, the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky with his Histoire du Soldat in Piazza Transalpina in Gorizia, straddling the Italian-Slovenian border.
Online reservations
All information on the shows and how to attend them can be found on www.piccolofestival.org .
Some shows are for a fee, others with free admission: all must be booked in any case .
The Piccolo Opera Festival also this year, although difficult, relaunches with a broad and ambitious program, made possible thanks to the fundamental support of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region (Department of Culture and Sport and Department of Productive Activities), of the Chamber of Commerce of Venezia Giulia, of the Friuli Foundation. The support of the municipal administrations of the places where the shows will be held are also important: Trieste, Gorizia, Aquileia, Faedis, Rivignano Teor as well as ten municipalities of the Collio Isontino including Cormons, Capriva del Friuli, Medea and Dolegna del Collio with which it was signed. a framework agreement. Strategic for the cross -border development of the Festival are the collaborations with the Agency for Tourism, Culture, Youth and Sport (ZTKMŠ) and with the European Capital of Culture Committee Nova Gorica-Gorizia 2025.
