In this jubilee year, this project, named after the words of St Augustine, inevitably focuses on the spiritual element that runs through so much music and through Ravenna itself, its churches, its magnificent basilicas and the organs they house: extraordinary ancient instruments whose sound brings back to life the history of the city and of its people. It’s like going on a journey through the collective memory locked up in these ancient machines, to reinterpret it through the eyes and voices of today, in a festival that bridges past and future, where a contemporary score by Leonardo Marino meets the immortal music of Vivaldi, while the “modern” Webern faithfully transcribes Bach’s monumental fugue. Different generations join hands today to learn the lessons of yesterday, full of hope for tomorrow.

An ideal connection exists between the protagonists of our two anniversaries: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594) and Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725). The former was considered the princeps musicae, and his work represented the paradigm of the polyphonic style for all composers, including Scarlatti, who was not immune to his influence, especially in his sacred production. Proof of this is the Messa Breve ‘a Palestrina’, composed in the a cappella style of Palestrina himself and intended for the Papal Court (both composers worked in Rome most of the time, another thing they had in common). Several manuscript copies of this work exist, two of which are signed by the composer himself; Odhecaton now combine them with Palestrina’s motets in a kind of unprecedented liturgy.

The Hungarian word ‘szabadban‘ means ‘freedom’; in Béla Bartók’s case, it means above all freedom of composition. This was the original title of his piano suite Out of Doors, in which unexpected sonic constructions and transcendental performance techniques challenge even the most experienced pianists. Similar challenges can be found in Debussy’s Second Book of Preludes, where the instrument is pushed to the limit of its resources, and in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, the most compelling and imaginative musical ‘promenade’ ever created in the history of music. They will all be entrusted to the talent of thirty-year-old Alexander Gadjiev, the first Italian pianist to reach the podium of the legendary Chopin Competition, sixty years after Maurizio Pollini.

“Like a celebrated master / she plays the harpsichord, the violin / the cello and the viola d’amore”: these anonymous verses celebrate Anna Maria, the most brilliant of the young orphans of the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, whose art enchanted visitors and inspired the “Red Priest” to teach her the violin as well as the sweet and persuasive viola d’amore, and to compose some of his virtuosic concertos for this complex twelve-stringed instrument, capable of evoking the Orient. The viola d’amore is the instrument that Alessandro Tamperi, long-standing soloist of the Accademia Bizantina, will alternate with the agile violin, proposing concertos from the treasure trove of inventions of Vivaldi’s L’estro armonico, as well as works such as the rare 1740 symphony dedicated to the Saxon prince, the guest of honour of a gala concert at the Pietà.

In a good mood and brimming with lively optimism: anyone who has attended one of their performances swears that this is how they left the concert. Young and dynamic, far from the serious and somewhat stuffy image of the classical musician, the members and founders of the Vision String Quartet – based in Berlin since 2012 – don’t give up discipline, study and technical refinement, but reach the highest levels of quality with a less formal, fresher, “smaller” and more direct approach to the score. Like the bands of the past, they always stand and play from memory, eager to establish a close relationship with the audience, both when performing the classics and when presenting their own compositions, such as Spectrum, which defines a new “sound” inspired by folk, pop, rock, funk, minimal… Because music, all music, is always good for you!

Heiner Goebbels is one of the most important and original composers of our time, and one of the most influential theatre directors in Europe. Surrogate Cities is undoubtedly his best-known and most performed work, a modern epic that takes the form of an imposing yet extremely varied and multifaceted musical organism in which the listener can delve, wander and linger like a modern flaneur, caught up in dizzying sonic ambushes and visions of shocking modernity. “My intention was not to produce a close-up but to try and read the city as a text and then to translate something of its mechanics and architecture into music. I construct something that confronts the audience and the audience reacts to it, discovering in the music a space they can enter complete with their associations and ideas”.

Alessandro Stradella, a Bologna-born composer of extraordinary expressive power in both the operatic and sacred repertoires, led a stormy life until he was stabbed in Genoa in 1682, the circumstances of his murder still unknown. Most of his oratorios – true sacred dramas, though not intended for the stage – were composed in Rome, where he was trained and spent most of his life. The most notable of these is St John the Baptist, which focuses on the events culminating in the beheading of the Baptist at the court of the lecherous Herod. This is one of Stradella’s many scores for an orchestra conceived as two groups of different sizes, the concerto grosso (the full orchestra) and the concertino (a small group of soloists), interacting with each other.

What makes this concerto a favourite of great performers is not so much its technical difficulty as its expressive versatility, an inventiveness that alternates lyrical outbursts with rhythmic playfulness. In short, it’s Mozart we’re talking about: his K 218 is perfectly suited to the intimate yet flawless virtuosity of Giuseppe Gibboni, the young winner of the Paganini Prize in 2021, at the age of twenty, who is now firmly established as one of the best violinists on the scene. Riccardo Muti, on the other hand, is not afraid to include this Mozart gem in a programme including some immortal Beethoven classics, such as Coriolanus, perhaps the most effective, restless and passionate ‘dramatic’ piece in the entire history of music, and the most brilliant and dazzling of Beethoven’s symphonies, which Wagner famously called “the apotheosis of the dance” due to its energetic, rhythmic and dance-like dynamism.