In Cividale for Mittelfest and in Ljubljana

A hundred years on, to celebrate the Ragazzi del ’99 and raise notes of hope and trust. One of the musical surprises of the twenty-seventh Mittelfest, the first under its new artistic director Haris Pašović, is the concert of words and music which on Wednesday evening, in Piazza Duomo in Cividale, will remember the young men who fell in the First World War. A co-production with the Ljubljana Festival, where the concert will be presented on Friday, it will feature the Ljubljana International Orchestra, made up mostly of musicians who are also young, from various countries including Italy, Slovenia and Austria: nations that engage in dialogue at Mittelfest and that a century ago found themselves fighting on opposing fronts. Joining them on stage will be the Sarajevo Philharmonic, which carries with it the memory of the bloody and tragic war in Bosnia. And the piano soloist will be Viviana Lasaracina from Apulia, “a brilliant Millennial”, explains Haris Pašović, the Bosnian director who staged a legendary “Aspettando Godot” during the siege of Sarajevo. For his first edition of the Cividale festival he chose as its focus precisely the young people born around the turn of the millennium, the generation that will be the future of Europe. The concert programme opens with Alfredo Casella's “Pagine di guerra” of 1915 and includes, among other works, a very recent piece by the Hungarian composer Peter Eotvos, “Alle vittime senza nome”, jointly commissioned from the composer by the Filarmonica della Scala, the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, the Rai Symphony Orchestra and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.