Bari, Anima Mea: 16th edition of the festival of Music and Wars from Ancient Europe to the present day.

The sixteenth edition of the Anima Mea festival was presented yesterday morning in the council hall of the Municipality of Bari..
The press conference was attended by the Councilor for Culture of the Municipality of Bari, Paola Romano, and, representing the Municipalities of Andria and Sannicandro di Bari, among the locations involved in the program, respectively the Councilors Daniela Di Bari and Gianfranco Terzo, in addition to the composer in residence of Anima Mea, Gianvincenzo Cresta, who acted as the artistic director, Gioacchino De Padova, absent for health reasons.

Also present at the festival were the curator of the scene, Carlo Bruni, and the actress Nunzia Antonio, who introduced the meeting by reading a passage from “Atti Umani” by the 2024 Nobel Prize winner for literature, Han Kang.

"We are delighted to host the presentation of the XVI edition of Anima Mea in the council room of the Palazzo di Città, which involves not only the City of Bari but also the Municipalities of Andria, Palo del Colle, Minervino Murge and Sannicandro di Bari - Said Paula Romano -. It is not a coincidence, but the result of a choice that responds to our idea of ​​living the area we administer as a single large territory, cultivating relationships and possibilities. Culture, which by its nature is the ideal tool for building bridges, helps us achieve this goal of understanding and declining cultural policies according to an idea of ​​an integrated area. To do so, we hope for a constant dialogue between councilors but also between countries and cultures: this edition of the Anima Mea festival not only brings together authors from different countries of the world and music from different eras but also brings innovation into play, creating a network that ideally links the "human race" by enhancing the diversity that represents the fundamental heritage for building equality. When peoples oppose each other in war, they do so starting from the idea of ​​highlighting religious, political or ethnic borders that instead disappear thanks to the ability of culture to create relationships by capturing the essence of the human. Our commitment is to work together so that the next edition of this festival is even richer and more widespread.".

"The Anima Mea Festival - has explained Gian Vincenzo Cresta - it is not a place for a few, but brings together more subjects, more cities, more ensembles. It is a laboratory of ideas that does not chase the culture of the event, because in art it is the offer that makes the demand. The quality of the musical proposal is of the highest level and does not foresee a closure of the programming within the confines of ancient music, but also forays into new music, but always in relation to the past. And it is according to this idea that we propose to gather the public around the seductive power of music".

One hundred and fifty years of musical art in Europe, with an idea of ​​contemporaneity linked to the moment of execution, a link between past and present. At the Anima Mea festival, 9 different productions in 19 concerts scheduled from October 18 to December 6 between Bari (church of Santa Scolastica), Andria (church of Sant'Anna), Bisceglie (Vecchie Segherie Mastrototaro), Minervino Murge (Sacello della Cattedrale), Palo del Colle (church of Purgatory) and Sannicandro di Bari (Scuderie del Castello), the past is explored by connecting it to the present, even with new and very new music, but within the ways of an ancient time.

"A non-historiographical relationship, but rather an emotional and sentimental one, which we have sought in the concertato style of Monteverdi and in the Cantar alla Viola, a performance practice, entirely Italian, of the early sixteenth century.”, explains the artistic director Gioacchino De Padova.

For this sixteenth edition, created with the contributions of the Ministry of Culture, the Puglia Region and the Municipalities of Bari, Andria, Palo del Colle, Sannicandro di Bari and Minervino Murge and the patronage of Rai Puglia, as well as the precious hospitality of the Community of Santa Scolastica al Porto (Bari), Italia Nostra (Andria), Confraternita del Purgatorio (Palo del Colle) and Vecchie Segherie Mastrototaro (Bisceglie), the Anima Mea festival has called upon great interpreters of the Italian and European scene and entrusted the actress Nunzia Antonino with short literary preludes on the theme of war, as present in our daily lives as in the golden age of music in the Old Continent.

In the words of writer Adania Schibli, author of the novel “A Minor Detail” about the 1949 Palestinian exodus, Anima Mea shines a light on the present, which cannot ignore what has been, and introduces the double inaugural concert scheduled in Bari (18 October) and Palo del Colle (19 October), where the mezzo-soprano Marta Infante and the Orchestra Vespres d'Arnadí conducted by Dani Espasa on the harpsichord will celebrate Italian music and its influence in Europe with the production of Antonio Vivaldi (Orlando furioso, Orlando finto pazzo, Il Farnace) in parallel with the repertoire of the Catalan composer Domenico Terradeglias (Artaserse e Imeneo in Atene), who trained in Napoli and exploded at Venice.

Winds of war will still blow from the prose of the 2024 Nobel Prize-winning South Korean writer Han Kang, who in “Human Acts” He recounted the never-before-told carnage of Chun Doo-hwan's 1979 coup d'état in the West, a story chosen to introduce the concert "The Time of the Voice" scheduled in Bari (October 28), meeting place of the international artistic partnership between the vocal ensemble Musicatreize of Marseille and the ensemble of historical instruments Orfeo Futuro directed by Roland Hayrabedian, who together present a program in which contemporary authors such as Giacinto Scelsi, Luca Antignani and Gianvincenzo Cresta draw on ancient vocal and instrumental skills placed in parallel with the seventeenth-century works of Claudio Monteverdi and Pietro Andrea Ziani.

The world of the living and the dead meet in Isabel Allende's masterpiece “The House of the Spirits”, a prelude to the poetry in music between two worlds in “Canto de amor y ausencia”, a project between Baroque and the Beatles, Arcadelt and the Argentine tradition, which Luciana Elizondo (voice and viola da gamba) and Juanco Francione (archlute, guitar and charango) propose in Palo del Colle (6 November), Bisceglie (7 November) and Sannicandro (8 November).

The limits of images in the sufferings of war have been described by Susan Sontag in “In front of the pain of others”, a literary overture to the concert “In universa terra” having as its fulcrum the representative madrigal “The combat of Tancredi and Clorinda”, which marks the fourth centenary of its first performance. A concert with a video installation by Davide Marrone that sees on stage in Bari (November 12), Palo del Colle (November 13) and Bisceglie (November 14) the soprano Valeria La Grotta, the contralto/tenor Alessandro Giangrande and the tenor Massimo Lombardi with the Ensemble Orfeo Futuro directed on the harpsichord and organ by Luca Guglielmi.

Children and war were told by Rosella Postorino in “I limited myself to loving you”, prologue to the concert by Gaetano Nasillo and Sara Bennici (cello) with Luca Guglielmi (harpsichord) on the production of three great Italian cellist-composers of the eighteenth century, Stefano Galeotti, Carlo Graziani and Luigi Boccherini, proposed by Anima Mea for Sannicandro (15 November), Bari (16 November) and Palo del Colle (17 November).
And with Gaetano Nasillo, supported by the Ensemble Orfeo Futuro still directed by Luca Guglielmi, the cello will be further explored to go to the origins of the solo concert in Bari (November 20), Bisceglie (November 21) and Sannicandro (November 22), where the events will be introduced by a story by Anis Ghamineh on what Gaza is today.

More pearls of the baroque with the countertenor Nicolò Balducci and a great recorder, Dan Laurin, who with the Ensemble Orfeo Futuro they explore in Minervino (November 24) and Andria (church of Sant'Anna) the music of the castrato singer and composer Filippo Finazzi alongside the production of the Apulian Domenico Sarro, of Georg Philip Telemann and of Giuseppe Porsile.
A rarity is represented by the Stabat Mater for two voices by the eighteenth-century composer from Salento Pasquale Cafaro, reference author of the concert that in Bari (November 29) will have as protagonists Carmela Osato (soprano), Antonia Salzano (contralto) and Orfeo Futuro conducted by Pierfrancesco Borrelli.

Anima Mea will close in Andria (December 6) with “Lux Fortunae”, a tribute to the motets of the Genoese Giovanni Antonio Guido who lived between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the Ensemble Orfeo Futuro and solo voice Angelica Disanto (soprano).

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