In Parma a week of great music among swifts and the scent of lime trees

While the city’s greatest musical institution, the Teatro Regio, is closed for important energy efficiency works (but not silent, given that it is about to announce all the seasons of 2025), Parma hosted a series of musical meetings that were very different from each other but all of the highest level.

A figure that confirms the recent findings on the perception of the quality of life in European cities made known by Istat: if there are many of us who think that in the last five years the situation in Parma has unfortunately worsened, between increasingly evident degradation and impotence of the Administration to face it, we can always console ourselves with the values ​​of culture, starting precisely from music and theater which here have given birth to a flourishing of important initiatives highly appreciated by the public.

Let’s start from the second edition of Farnese Festivalwhose success was guaranteed by the artistic direction of Fabio Biondi, who was able to involve two other authoritative baroque artists such as Ottavio Dantone and Rinaldo Alessandrini and, who with his Gallant Europe this year also offered an interesting rediscovery: the comedy Trinummus by Tito Maccio Plauto with music by Father Giovanni Battista Martini expressly composed in 1780 for a performance at the Collegio dei Nobili. This time the actors were those of Teatro Due Foundation, always meritorious in sponsoring musical theater proposals a little outside the most well-known itineraries, such as the staging of Schönberg’s Erwartung a few months ago, with the musical performance of the excellent musicians of Europa Galante directed by its own director, for the occasion also violist. It was somehow enthralling to cross four centuries and more of musical history, passing from one evening to the next from the extraordinary vocal polyphony of the Fourth Book of Claudio Monteverdi’s five-voice madrigals, performed by the specialists of the Concerto Italiano directed by Alessandrini, to virtuosity and the rhythmic variety of Oliver Messiaen’s pianism, the central part of the concert by the talented Lorenzo Soulés at the Casa della Musica, the last event of Traiettorie before the summer (and let’s keep this praiseworthy review close: when it was born 34 years ago, considering it a utopian project , someone ironically distorted its name into Trattorie, but today it is still very much alive and well and is one of the few courageous devices that allow the music of our time to be known).

No less talented than the Frenchman Soulés, protagonist at Traiettoriethe Korean Jae Hong Park, protagonist in the pleasant setting of Piazzale San Francesco of the Second Saint-Saëns concert with the Toscanini Philharmonic directed by Vitali Alekseenkov. The soloist was good and the conductor was also good, who in the first part of the concert had to protect the precious arabesques of Mendelssohn’s Dream from the festive and somewhat intrusive participation of the swifts of San Francesco, then more discreet and silent while the orchestra “danced ” with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

Great music and let’s also include swifts and the inebriating scent of lime trees: in these early summer nights Parma knows how to involve and make up for many shortcomings. (mb)