LacMus Festival 2020
LacMus Festival, the great international music festival held in summer in Tremezzina, on Lake Como, will be held – albeit in a slightly reduced edition – from August 19 to 23.
And it will be a special edition in every sense, in which new solutions, new formulas and new locations will be experimented, in addition to those, wonderful, already protagonists of past editions.
Starting with the opening day, Wednesday, August 19, which will propose no less than a “piano marathon” in three parts (at 11:00, 19:00 and 21.30) at Villa Carlotta, a tribute to the 250 years since the birth of Ludwig Van Beethoven. In order to promote social distancing, but above all to offer the opportunity to enjoy a concert in an unusual way, the spectators will be able to choose to wear wi-fi headphones, which will allow them to attend the concert while moving freely between the garden and the first floor of the villa. An experience of sure impact, which will allow to combine the enchantment of music with the artistic and architectural suggestions offered by Villa Carlotta. On the programme five of Beethoven’s nine Symphonies, in Franz Liszt’s piano transcription: pages in which the Hungarian composer, himself a brilliant pianist, takes the macrocosm of the orchestra back to a more domestic dimension, without losing anything of the revolutionary spirit of Beethoven’s research on the symphonic genre.
The Symphonies will be performed by young artists from the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Waterloo (Belgium) and pianists Louis Lortie and Maurizio Baglini. Possibility to buy a package dinner at Villa Carlotta between the end of the 7pm and the beginning of the 9.30pm concert.
The beautiful Villa del Balbianello will be the protagonist of the appointments scheduled for the next two days: Thursday, August 20 at 21:00 with “Moonlight at Balbianello” and the pianist Louis Lortie engaged in three Beethoven Sonatas, while the next day, Friday, August 21, the appointment is at 19.30 for a musical cocktail at sunset, a unique opportunity to watch the sunset from a special place like Villa del Balbianello. Anton Dressler on clarinet and Ingrid Fliter on piano will move between Poulenc, Chopin. Stravinsky, Piazzolla and Milhaud.
Lortie’s recital combines three works apparently distant from each other, within the corpus of Beethoven’s 32 Sonatas, but united by an emotional figure of intense lyricism: n. 4, dedicated to Maestro Haydn, n. 14, which gives its name to the evening by virtue of its famous apocryphal title “Al chiaro di luna”, and n. 30, which shines with its luminous E major in the sublime triptych of the last Sonatas.
Anton Dressler and Ingrid Fliter will instead dialogue the romanticism of Chopin’s piano with the twentieth-century geometries of Stravinsky, Poulenc, Milhaud and Piazzolla, authors united by their openness to polystylistic contaminations and their search for new timbre effects in clarinet writing.
Saturday 22nd August at 18.30 the Festival moves to the Sanctuary of the Madonna del Soccorso of Ossuccio, with its amazing view of the Tremezzina. Starring the Adorno Quartet on music by Mozart and Beethoven for a concert with the ambitious title: “Legacy of the perfect form“. The program creates a new mirror game between the first, light Quartet written by a fourteen-year-old Mozart in an inn in Lodi, during one of his Italian trips, and the more mature pages dedicated by Beethoven to the same chamber ensemble, culminating in the Great Fugue op. 133, radical and enigmatic in its deep work on counterpoint.
Gran final Sunday, August 23rd with a double appointment: at 6.00 a.m. in the Terrazza a lago in the Parco di Mezzegra (new location of this edition) there will be an extraordinary dawn concert with Anton Dressler on clarinet and live electronics (scheduled own compositions and improvisation), while at 7.00 p.m. there will be an extraordinary concert at dawn with Anton Dressler on clarinet and live electronics. 30 the last concert of this edition will be held – as tradition has it – at the Grand Hotel Tremezzo: “Songs and Arias at the Grand” will perform opera arias (Rossini, Tosti, Obradors, Bizet, Verdi, Saint Saëns) performed by tenor Renè Barbera and mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb accompanied on piano by Paolo Bressan and Sophia Muñoz.
The programme is very enjoyable, in which the brilliant four-handed piano transcriptions of well-known pages by Rossini and Bizet will alternate languid arias by Tosti and sensual Spanish songs by Obradors, without forgetting a small tribute to Giuseppe Verdi, with two gems from Rigoletto.
In response to post-lockdown social distancing needs, the art direction has studied specific solutions for each location in order to guarantee the highest level of safety to the public.
The concerts will take place outdoors and will be presented without intermission.