Luciano Berio Festival, Radicondoli 2023: Dialogues

Dialogue: declined in the plural, this is the key word of a three-day music festival where different realities and attitudes of making and thinking music, even apparently far apart, are placed in continuous dialogue.
The first of the dialogues is that between a town, Radicondoli (where Luciano Berio chose to dwell from the first half of the 1970s), its inhabitants and various sound constellations inspired by Berio’s music and thought.
The dialogues thus involve places, attitudes, and practices of a 'making music together', based on the convergence of opposites. The sound dialogues are played out between inside and outside, between the square and the concert hall, between professional and amateur musicians, between art and popular music, between the music of today and that of the past, between a public and a private dimension, between generations and different perceptions...

For the Festival’s brochure click here
For the programme in English click here

Inspired by two spatial and musical contexts central to Berio's work, the festa and the piazza, the Festival started on 26 May with a collective and multimedia open-air performance involving an itinerant sound performance (where the role of the town crier was reinterpreted electronically), a band and a choir. Open to the public and spiced up with themed cicchetteria, this festa was an opportunity to celebrate, remember and (re)discover together music from the cultured and popular tradition - music composed, and re-elaborated by Berio, or that was just particularly dear to him.
On 27 May, the twentieth anniversary of the Berio’s passing, the Festival hosted two instrumental masterclasses, intended as a prelude to a series of formative meetings scheduled for the Festival’s next editions. These first meetings were dedicated to an in-depth study of the formal process and interpretative peculiarities of a selection of Berio’s piano and cello pieces. Some of the participants, selected through public announcement, will be invited to perform in a concert scheduled in Radicondoli on 26 November 2023. The second day of the Festival closed with a concert featuring music for piano (solo also four-hands), cello solo and for mixed choir written by Luciano Berio, his father Ernesto and his grandfather Adolfo, performed in dialogue with compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti.
On the morning of the 28th, the Festival moved from Radicondoli to “Il Colombaio”, the Berio family’s private residence. The garden of the composer's house hosted the last tribute to his music: Berio’s reading of Franz Schubert's An die Musik.
During the Festival, and until 25 June 2023, the exhibition space of Palazzo Bizzarrini will host the sound installation In-Naturale, a homage to the music of Luciano Berio curated by Tempo Reale.