Wratislavia Cantans festival opens in Poland
PR dla Zagranicy
Grzegorz Siwicki
07.09.2017 10:22
The Wratislavia Cantans music festival opens on Thursday in Wrocław, southwestern Poland, with the performance of Claudio Monteverdi’s opera Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria (The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland) by the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner.
Photo: geralt/pixabay.com/CC0 Creative Commons
The motto of this year’s event, Reditar Cantando, refers to the beginnings of opera as a musical genre and to the legacy of Monteverdi, a composer who charted new trends in European music. This year marks the 450th anniversary of his birth.
The programme of the 11-day event also includes Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, a selection of works by Georg Philipp Telemann, who died 250 years ago, and The Phantoms, a rarely performed cantata by Stanisław Moniuszko, the father of Polish national opera.
The festival ends on 17 September with the presentation of Mozart’s last opera, La Clemenza di Tito, by an international group of soloists accompanied by the Russian ensemble MusicAeterna Orchestra and Choir.
Wratislavia Cantans is one of the oldest music festivals in Poland. Founded in 1966, it is being held for the 52nd time.
The festival is a member of the Geneva-based European Association of Music Festivals and of the International Society for Performing Arts Foundation in New York. (mk/gs)