Summer Music Festival: from 1985 to the present
Uto Ughi
Honorary President
Maurizio Pietrantonio
Artistic director
Solo players and ensamble of players our guests in the past years
"Music without limits"
Fifteen consecutive editions for a music festival is no mean feat, especially if we go back further in time to the musical tradition that had been firmly rooted in Sorrento. During the 1970s Sorrento had already played host to the "Incontri Musica1i Internazionali" out of which today's Summer Music Festival emerged in 1985. The success of this festival is even more remarkable if we think of the many performances that were hurriedly conceived in the early 1980s, only to be then lost in the troubled waters of the 1990s.
The "Sorrento Summer Music Festival", organised by the Sorrento-Sant' Agnello Tourism Board, is sponsored by the Campania Region Department for Tourism and the Performing Arts. It also enjoys the patronage of the Council of Ministers and the Sorrento municipal authorities. With Maurizio Pietrantonio at the helm, as musician, artistic director, the brains and its driving force, the Festival has never lost sight of its course.
For many people the venue of the Cloister of St. Francis has over the years become an event not to be missed, the right occasion to blend together good music and relaxation without the "tourist" label attached to it.
This formula still works today, but is simple only in appearance, with its blend of well-known celebrities, emerging young musicians, original ideas, refined music programmes and, as always, the classics. All of this is carefully measured and served with care, and every effort is made to ensure it meets the public's expectations. This formula does, of course, seem simple and straightforward, but let us not forget that the risk of performing routine pieces is always just around the corner. We must not rest on our laurels; change is the password. The listener, though spoilt by the recording industry, is not prepared to forgive anything and, wherever possible, expects no less than a star.
From this point of view Sorrento has certainly never disappointed its audience. Right from the very first edition in 1985 the Festival has seen the violinist Uto Ughi
a frequent performer at the festival and now honorary presindent since the 1998 edition, perform for the first and not the last time. We need only glance through the list of distinguished artists to find many outstanding names:
Maria Tipo,
Martha Argerich, Aldo Ciccolini, Michele Campanella, Maria Joao Pires,
Rosalyn Tureck and
Cristina Ortiz
to name but a few of the pianists.
Furthermore, by shunning the practice of securing a leading figure at all costs, Maurizio Pietrantonio has managed, on more than one occasion, to bring groups of great renown to Sorrento and has been instrumental in drawing special attention to the much loved Baroque repertoire. It is not surprising that the Cloister has witnessed genuine Baroque experts, such as Philip Pickett with the New London Consort, Jordi Savall and Hesperion XX, Frans Bruggen with the Amsterdam Bach Solisten and, amongst the Italian representatives, the
Solisti Veneti
conducted by Claudio Scimone, and the Cappella della pietà dei Turchini led by Antonio Florio.
Admittedly, this is a rather rushed amarcord that does little justice to some of the Festival' s guest artists. Of course, the faces of others who are no longer with us spring to mind:
Shura Cherkassky,
and Sergio Fiorentino perhaps the last great Romantics; Severino Gazzelloni, the first artist to perform in the first edition ten years ago; Tatiana Nicolaeva, the elegant and rigorous pianist.
Then, of course, there are the classical orchestras, with such widely acclaimed conductors as Peter Maag, Sandor Vegh and Yuri Bashmet, the excellent violist and leader of the Moscow Soloists, and Nobuko Imai. So far we have referred to the classics, but the Sorrento Summer Music Festival has also remained true to its special intuition for originality. The 1988 edition, for instance, saw a string of first-class virtuosos, Ivan Davis,
Byron Janis
, and finally Cherkassky.
The following year we heard several up-and-coming female musicians like Martha Argerich, Tatiana Nicolaeva, the very young Hélène Grimaud and Alice, winner of the San Remo Festival, come to grips with music by Fauré, Satie and Ravel. It is in Sorrento, luckily, that the rigid barrier separating one music genre from another has never existed. Indeed, room has been found in the last five editions for jazz, great jazz naturally, to be performed by musicians of the calibre of
Michel Petrucciani,
Martial Solal and Enrico Rava, Jim Hall, Joe Lovano and Richard Galliano.
What is more, between the classical and jazz genres, the respectively so-called cultured and popular repertoires, there is today an area increasingly sought after by musicians and equally appreciated by audiences. In this area. a sort of no-man's land, the Sorrento Summer Music Festival has moved intelligently and has excelled in achieving this fusion. We need not go further than Luis Bacalov and his "syncretistic music", Enrico Rava and his rendering of Puccini, the American pianist John Bayless with his Bach-like interpretation of the Beatles, or the Salonisti with their variations on waltz and New Age pieces and, of course, not forgetting the two splendid bands of the London Brass and Canadian Brass.
How, in the light of so many repeated successes, could we possibly ignore the winning combination of this year's edition? Once again we have on stage the classics, with such renowned musicians as the Finnish pianist Olli Mustonen, the violinists Vernikov and Spivakov, the pianists Till Fellner, Pietro De Maria, Benedetto Lupo, Christian Zacharias, Thibaudet, the singer Kim Criswell and the violinist Leila Josefowicz; international jazz of the highest order with Jim Hall, Paul Bley and Paolo Fresu, minimalist music from the Balanescu Quartet and the curiosity stirred in us by new home-grown musical groups such as the Fontanay Trio. All the ingredients are there and what remains is for the recipe to once again satisfy everyone's taste.
Stefano Valanzuolo.
E-mail: valan@tecnogen.it
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