Saturday, May 3rd 2025 at 8 pm, Maestro Diego Ceretta on the podium of the Sala Grande leading the Orchestra and Choir of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the Orchestra della Toscana and the Children's Choir of the Accademia del Maggio.

One of the most famous compositions of the 20th century, Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem", is on the program.

The soloists of the evening are soprano Elizaveta Shuvalova, tenor Ian Bostridge and baritone Dietrich Henschel.

In collaboration with the Orchestra della Toscana

The concert will be broadcast live on Rai Radio 3

Florence, April 30th, 2025 – The concerts of the 87th Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Festival continue. On Saturday, May 3rd, at 8:00 pm, Maestro Diego Ceretta will take to the podium of the Sala Grande del Maggio – leading the Orchestra and Choir of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the Orchestra della Toscana, of which he is principal conductor, and the Children's Choir of the Accademia del Maggio – for the third symphonic event of the Festival.

The program includes one of the most famous compositions of the 20th century, the famous War Requiem op. 66 for soloists, choir, children's choir, orchestra and chamber orchestra by Benjamin Britten.

The evening was born in collaboration with the Orchestra della Toscana, a precious duo described by Daniele Spini, artistic director of the O.R.T: “The collaboration between Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and Orchestra della Toscana finds a particularly intense moment in this production. Leading the Maggio ensembles is Diego Ceretta, principal conductor of the ORT, and the ORT expresses the group of musicians who interact with the singing soloists as a chamber orchestra. Two institutions meet to make music together, in a composition of great artistic value and no less high moral meaning”.

A moral meaning that was anything but casual: Britten's masterpiece, in fact, was performed for the first time for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, built after the original 14th-century structure was almost razed to the ground during a bombing raid in the 2nd World War. The composer also decided not to use only the traditional Latin text of the Requiem: he wanted a testimony and, after some research, decided to use the poetic texts of Wilfred Owen, a man who had lived, written and, finally, tragically suffered the Great War.

During the first performance in May 1962, the three soloists were Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, one English and the other German, who represented the newfound harmony between England and Germany. Another protagonist of that famous evening was supposed to be the Russian soprano Galina Višnevskaja, to represent the pacification with the Soviet universe, but she could not be hired and was therefore replaced by Heather Harper.

On May 3rd, this aspect is reaffirmed and underlined in the Florentine War Requiem, proving how music can be an extraordinary voice, capable of breaking down walls that would otherwise seem insurmountable. The three solo voices of the evening, who ‘renew’ Britten’s message of peace and harmony among the peoples of the world, are the Russian soprano Elizaveta Shuvalova, a talent from the Accademia del Maggio; English tenor Ian Bostridge, who with this performance reaches the 98th of his career and will be the protagonist of J.S.Bach's Matthäus-Passion next December, and German baritone Dietrich Henschel, one of the protagonists of Doktor Faust, performed in the winter of 2023.

The protagonist on the podium is the principal conductor of the Orchestra della Toscana, Diego Ceretta: a graduate of the Milan Conservatory, he studied composition, violin and conducting and subsequently perfected his skills at the Accademia Italiana di Direzione d’Orchestra with Gilberto Serembe and at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, where he studied with Luciano Acocella and Daniele Gatti.

Ceretta was assistant to Maestro Gatti himself in the world premiere of Giorgio Battistelli’s Giulio Cesare at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, and collaborated with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Fabio Luisi for Mahler’s Symphony No. 2.

The Teatro del Maggio, where Maestro Ceretta made his debut in May 2023, has also entrusted him with the conducting of Puccini’s La bohéme scheduled for the end of this year.

The concert:
On the night of 14 November 1940, German bombings razed Coventry to the ground, also destroying Saint Michael's Cathedral, the city's symbolic building. It took more than twenty years to rebuild it and bring it back to its former splendor. For the celebratory reconsecration ceremony, which took place on 30 May 1962, Benjamin Britten was asked to compose a work to remember the victims of the war, and thus one of his most famous and touching compositions was born: the War Requiem op. 66 for soloists, choir, boys' choir, orchestra and chamber orchestra. For Britten, the commission for the Requiem represented not only an opportunity to remember the fallen but also to denounce the horror and madness that characterize every war event, wherever it takes place. Hence the choice to combine different poetic and musical levels, which are the distinctive feature of this work. The composer chose to set to music the sections of the missa pro defunctis of the Latin liturgy (Introitus; Sequentia; Offertorium, Sanctus; Agnus Dei; Libera me) interspersed with some lyrics by Wilfred Owen, a young English poet who died at the front during the First World War. The prayers of the mass in Latin are entrusted to the soprano and the choir accompanied by the large orchestra; the tenor and the baritone, supported by the chamber orchestra, have the task of giving voice to two imaginary soldiers who in Owen's poetic verses question themselves on the meaning of death and the horror of war; while the boys' choir, a symbol of purity and innocence, is entrusted with the message of hope in a world at peace. On the ringing of the bells, the common thread of the composition, the choir whispers the age-old prayer (Requiem aeternam) but Owen's following verses sound anguishing like a cry of protest that rises from the folds of a mournful music. From different perspectives, Britten's Requiem speaks to us of the terror of catastrophe and the mystery of death. Emblematic and evocative is the finale in which the voices of the two soldiers who were once enemies on the battlefield find themselves together invoking eternal sleep, a very sweet melody that has the flavor of a lullaby glossed by the angelic voices of children.