"Omaggio a Luigi Dallapiccola"

Canti di prigionia 

Saturday June 7th 2025 at 8 pm, in the Zubin Mehta Hall, a new symphonic event as part of the “Maggio Aperto”.

50 years after his death, the Teatro del Maggio and the Accademia Musicale Chigiana are dedicating a symphonic evening to Luigi Dallapiccola; the program includes “Disegnare Rami” by Filippo Perocco and “Canti di prigionia” by Luigi Dallapiccola.

Lorenzo Donati on the podium of the Mehta Hall.

In co-production with Accademia Musicale Chigiana

With the patronage of ANED National Association of Former Deportees in Nazi Camps – Florence Section, Memorial of the Deportations, Luigi Dallapiccola Study Center, Florence and Academy of Arts and Design, Florence

Single seat €20

Florence, June 5th, 2025 – The shows of the Maggio Aperto cycle continue, included in the 87th Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Festival, the concerts that unite the Theater and its Festival with the world of the colorful and numerous musical realities of the Florentine territory.

Saturday, June 7th, 2025, at 8 pm, in the Zubin Mehta Hall, the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino - in collaboration with the Accademia Musicale Chigiana - presents the concert “Omaggio a Luigi Dallapiccola”.
The event is part of the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the death of Luigi Dallapiccola and for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi-Fascist prison, concentration and extermination camps.

The program includes two works of great symbolic value: the Canti di prigionia by Luigi Dallapiccola and the world premiere of Disegnare Rami by Filippo Perocco, a new composition commissioned by the Accademia Musicale Chigiana.

On stage a cast formed by performers and young promises linked to the Accademia Musicale Chigiana with the direction of Lorenzo Donati: among the protagonists of the evening the soprano Livia Rado, the percussionist Antonio Caggiano, the pianists Aldo Orvieto and Anna D’Errico, the harpists Emanuela Battigelli and Stefania Scapin, the Siena Cathedral Choir “Guido Chigi Saracini” and the Chigiana Percussion Ensemble.

The live electronics and the sound direction are entrusted to Alvise Vidolin, Nicola Bernardini and Julian Scordato.

The concert:

The Canti di prigionia  – a central composition of the twentieth century, written between 1938 and 1941 – represent a vibrant testimony of music as an act of civil protest against tyranny and the denial of freedom, built around the figures of Mary Stuart, Boethius and Girolamo Savonarola. The voices and instruments intensely convey this dramatic sound fresco, a masterpiece by Dallapiccola, a central figure not only for Florence, his adopted city from 1922 until his death, but for the entire Italian and international musical, cultural and civil panorama. Professor of composition at the Accademia Chigiana in 1971 and 1974, his teaching and his artistic personality strongly influenced the development of the following generation of composers.

Alongside this composition, Disegnare Rami by Filippo Perocco opens a new dimension of contemporary reflection. The work explores the beauty of nature and the principle of branching as a metaphor for existence, with a writing that blends double choir, two prepared pianos and analog electronics. Perocco leads the listener into a dreamlike and suspended world, building an ecology of wonder that invites us to meditate on the responsibility and care of the relationship with nature, enhancing the delicacy and sound detail as forms of awareness.