The Barga opera festival is a very important international cultural event which takes place in the medieval town of Barga, livening up the summer of the entire Serchio valley. The artistic project at the base of the festival’s programming, aims to recover and research less known operas from the baroque period and present them alongside modern and even contemporary operas. Such an approach aims at evaluating the artistic patrimony of operatic music before and after the classical repertoires of the 1800’s. Therefore there have been many contemporary pieces included in the Barga Opera Festivals that have been performed for the very first time on stage both nationally or internationally. In addition the festival has also often featured first contemporary performances of rediscovered works.
Friday 2 July – Barga (Lucca)
PIANOBARGA
Second half of the complete sonatas for four hands by W. A. Mozart – pianists Fabrizio Datteri e Nadia Lencioni
Teatro dei Differenti – 21.00
(full price 10 € – concessions 8 €)
Gallery:
Details:
by car: From Lucca SS12 towards Abetone, then ss 445 road towards Castelnuovo Garfagnana, until Fornaci di Barga, there take the road to Barga.
busses from Lucca
Nicholas Hunt
Associazione Musicale Opera Barga
0583 723250
operabarga@tiscali.it
Associazione Culturale Teatro e Musica Opera Barga
The festival came about in 1967 thanks to the initiative of the actor Peter Hunt and scenographer Gillian Armitage, both English, who moved to Barga sometime before. The married couple thought of using the structure of the “Teatro dei Differenti” in Barga to found an operatic school which would offer young singers, orchestra players, orchestra directors and scenographers the possibility of working on a show that would then be performed.
Over its thirty years of activity, the festival has undergone changes in management, institutional partners and even address due to the long closure of the theatre for restoration work, however, always maintaining its primary aims. The Barga Opera has recently started collaborating with the “Ensemble Modo Antico” to work on a three year project about Antonio Vivaldi.
As a testimony to the peculiarity and vitality of this artistic project of Barga Opera, between philology and experimentation , we only have to remember that in the 1991 programme, “Histoire de Babar” by Poulenc appeared together with “Il Paratajo”, an intermezzo by Niccolò Iomelli, never shown in Italy and found in the Biblioteque Nationale de Paris. In this same way, “Arsilda, Regina di Ponto”, Vivaldi’s third operatic composition which has never been performed in modern times, along with “Ritratto
Di Luciano Berio” were shown in 2001, and in 2002 Vivaldi’s “Orlando Furioso” and “Play it again, Nino”, a tribute to Nino Rota.