As part of the celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the twinning between La Spezia and Bayreuth, the Richard Wagner Association of La Spezia, the Giacomo Puccini Conservatory and the ACIT have proposed the creation of two concerts entirely performed by young musicians, students of the Conservatories of twinned cities, to be held one in La Spezia and one in Bayreuth.
The Hochschule fur Evangelische Kirchenmusik of Bayreuth promptly joined the project, which is being carried out thanks to the support of the Municipality of La Spezia, identifying the young performers in Fabian Schiefner, organist, and Julian Ritschel, pianist, students of the Hochschule of Bayreuth, and Claudia Belluomini soprano and Richard Wagner 2023 scholarship holder, and Giacomo Mattolini, pianist, students of the La Spezia Conservatory. The first concert was held on June 1st, the second will be held in Bayreuth in October this year, with the same performers and the same program.
In an interval of the concert, much appreciated by the large audience present, the RW presented the scholarship it awarded this year to Giulia Landi, a Germanist, a young graduate from La Spezia, with an excellent curriculum of studies in foreign languages. Her skills in Germanic philology, also in relation to the phenomenon of the recovery of Germanic sources at a European level – Wagner was one of the great nineteenth-century interpreters of the Nibelungic and Nordic tradition – will make the stay program in the twinned city particularly educational for her.
It is important to highlight that, since its establishment in February 2011, the RW has allocated, every year, excluding those of the pandemic, a scholarship to young people who have particularly distinguished themselves in the field of German music and culture in general, allowing them to participate in the prestigious Bayreuth Wagner Festival.
In the rich program of the 25th anniversary of the twinning, the concert, which was given to us by the fresh but already promising talent of four young musicians, has a meaning that is not only cultural, but of union and exchange of experiences between young generations that take place through the beauty and commitment to which they have based their lives, and it is a hymn to PEACE between peoples which, at this moment, the world desperately needs, even with small but important gestures of mutual appreciation, understanding , respect and brotherhood.
