The sixth edition of LacMus, the International Music Festival in Tremezzina, Lake Como, will be held this year from July 7 to 17 and, as in past seasons, will bring to the shores of Lake Como — and beyond — international-caliber artists and up-and-coming talents, engaged with artistic directors Louis Lortie and Paolo Bressan in no fewer than 13 concerts.
This edition’s guests include the very young winner (the first Italian after 24 years) of the Paganini Competition, Giuseppe Gibboni, cellist Jan Vogler, artistic director of the prestigious Moritzburg chamber music festival (celebrating its 30th anniversary), Russian violinist Pavel Berman and the multifaceted U.S. pianist-composer Dan Tepfer.
Since its inception, LacMus has been characterized by its choice of evocative locations, where the dialogue between music, history and nature would become alive and vibrant.
Therefore, the Festival’s traditional venues are reconfirmed, from Villa Carlotta to Villa del Balbianello, from the Sanctuary of the Beata Vergine del Soccorso in Ossuccio (Unesco site), to the Grand Hotel Tremezzo, to the Greenway and Villa Melzi d’Eril in Bellagio. There is no shortage, as last year, of two special events on Comacina Island, the only one on Lake Como.
Concerts on the water’s edge will be joined, for the first time, by an evening that will take the LacMus audience to the rolling hills of Brianza, dotted with ancient noble residences: in fact, it will be the Castello Durini in Alzate Brianza that will host a musical event at sunset.
The program once again chooses some important anniversaries as a red thread, dwelling on two composers, César Franck and Alexander Skrjabin, whose 200th and 150th birth anniversaries respectively. Both composers are characterized by a deep relationship with the dimension of the transcendent; therefore, the entire programming revolves around the concept of “mystical music.” Music, with its intangible language, has always been associated with the sphere of the divine, from its very first manifestations in human history. And if Franck, the organist and composer of religious pages, as well as the leader of French post-Romantic music, embodies a happily unresolved dualism between faith and sensuality, with the Russian Skrjabin we are dealing with a visionary experimenter, in whom the mystical drive is realized in the creation of a synaesthetic language, made up of sounds and colors in close relationship.
LacMus Festival is organized by the Music and Cultural Association “Ars Aeterna” with the support of the City of Tremezzina, the American Friends of LacMus Festival Association and private donors.