Wild summer festival – sublime sustainability

Martin Luther King, Aleppo & hard rock, Cole Porter & Vespers plus Romagna’s got talent!

Romagna certainly has talent and star conductor Riccardo Muti and his Romagna-born wife lead the pack.

Couldn’t be more local to global with an all-Romagna art direction team aiming to deliver a typically quirky and challenging mix of music festival feasts with sustainability at their heart this summer in Ravenna, in Italy’s Romagna.

Ravenna itself is an extraordinary world-heritage city once capital of the Roman Empire and with a glorious hoard of 6^th century basilicas and stunning mosaics.

In the city’s 1600-year old San Vitale mosaic-encrusted basilica, built by the Emperor Justinian to emulate Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, sublime vespers will be played. It was here that Cole Porter’s breath was taken by the mosaics in the glistening dark mausoleum to Galla Placidia and he got the idea for his classic ‘Night and Day’

So, it’s fitting that his glorious Shakespeare-based musical ‘Kiss me Kate’ will be performed – in another more fitting venue, of course – the city theatre!

Back on a more serious note – the event this year is dedicated to Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a Dream’ and there will be a lecture in the city’s ancient library. There will also be a concert of Love songs and hymns of the Syrian-Christian, Armenian, Muslim, and Jewish communities – the splendours of battle-ridden Aleppo.

There is an enormous special section of electric guitar concerts, films galore (including ‘Battleship Potemkin’), the theatre is opening its doors and its facilities to local people who want to try their talent, naturally Riccardo Muti will be conducting a colourful concert, naturally there will be a range of modern composers from Philip Glass to Bernstein and there will be a bunch of superbly edgy events that stand out as you read the programme.

No more strange, challenging and ironic event could be created than the concert in Forli -Mussolini’s birthplace still studded with his brutalist art deco architecture. Here Ute Lemper, the heir apparent to the Lotte Lenya and Kurt Weil partnership will sing America through the words and notes of Bob Dylan, Cole Porter, Tom Waits, down to the self-destructive extravagance of Charles Bukowski.

So, something for almost everybody – particularly if you are politically-engaged. For today’s Italy, the Ravenna Festival certainly has a dream!

Want to be a part of it? Want to experience something really fabulous this summer? Plus great food and wine of course – contact [email protected] http://www.BestofRomagna.com  http://www.facebook.com/Bestofromagna