The great symphonic concerts of the 2024 Festival, an invitation to joy and peace
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Orff's Carmina Burana at the Arena di Verona
Two event evenings at the 101st Arena di Verona Opera Festival 2024 with prestigious conductors and solo voices
Exactly two centuries after the first performance, Beethoven's revolutionary Ninth Symphony is back on 11 August, with its message of universal brotherhood
Two of the most loved and performed lyrical-symphonic masterpieces in the history of the Arena’s Festival. For the 101st season, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony returns with its message of universal brotherhood, and the spectacular Carmina Burana. Two event evenings with leading directors and performers, enhanced by the artistic complexes of Fondazione Arena engaged in full ranks.
On Sunday, 11 August, at 9.45 pm, the notes of the genius of Bonn will resound among the millenary stones of the Arena. In 1824 Beethoven, already famous and almost completely deaf, presented his last symphony, the Ninth, to the public. A titanic composition that, after the first three traditional movements, introduced for the first time the chorus in the finale, carrying a universal message of brotherhood with the verses of the Ode to the joy of his contemporary, Schiller. Two hundred years later, this work attracts the same admiration with its powerful charm. This is confirmed in the unique setting of the Arena di Verona where Andrea Battistoni, a young Veronese conductor with an established international career, will guide an exceptional vocal quartet, featuring the mezzo-soprano Anna Maria Chiuri and the bass Alexander Vinogradov, already applauded by the Festival’s audience, joined by the American soprano Erin Morley and the Italian tenor Ivan Magrì, both making their Arena debut.
On 1 September, the songs of love and fortune of the Middle Ages reimagined by Orff with the spectacular Carmina Burana
On Sunday, 1 September, at 9:30 pm, it will be the turn of Carmina Burana, the secular songs of the 13th century discovered in the monastery of Benediktbeuern, reinvented with a large orchestra and chorus, and the 20th century sounds conceived by Carl Orff in 1936 for a scenic cantata. Twenty-four songs, mutually connected, invite humanity to open up to the love and daily joys of food, wine and youth, as unpredictable luck looms with its emblematic wheel that opens and closes the concert with the famous iconic canto O Fortuna. There will be spectacular plays of light for this return, which will see young conductor Michele Spotti on the podium for the first time in the Arena with three voices appreciated in the last Festivals, namely the Italian countertenor Filippo Mineccia, and the South Korean baritone Youngjun Park. They and the artistic ensembles of the Arena will be joined by two choruses of treble voices, A.LI.VE. and A.d'A.Mus., engaged in different productions of the Festival and gathered for an evening.
If Beethoven's was the first symphony performed in the Arena (1927), repeated five times over a century until the last performance in 2021, the most recent is the Carmina, which has been successful in four editions since 2014. Both evenings, having a duration of about 70 minutes without an interval, will see the Orchestra of the Fondazione Arena di Verona and the Chorus prepared by Roberto Gabbiani.
