CREMONA – Preparations are underway for the Monteverdi Festival, which will start this evening at 8pm with the premiere of “L’Orfeo”. Meanwhile, a meeting with the maestro was held this morning at the Ponchielli Theater Ridotto Sir John Eliot Gardiner, a brilliant interpreter of the Monteverdian and baroque repertoire, as well as, since last year, also an honorary citizen of Cremona. Gardiner recalled his now thirty-year experience in Cremona, which began in ’93 conducting the Vespro and L’incoronazione di Poppea and which saw him perform the Moral and Spiritual Selva last year at the closing of the Festival.
«I’m writing a book – he says – which will be called ‘Monteverdi and his constellation’: a group of seven artists, writers, mathematicians and astronomers, born in the 1570s. From Galileo to Shakespeare, from Rubens to Bacon. Monteverdi shared with the artists of his generation the ability to make their works relevant to the contemporary world. Nothing comes between them and us, between our time and their time.”
The critic intervened with him Alberto Mattiolithe interpreter Bernardo Roger, and maestro Antonio Greco, main musical director of the Festival, who played with Gardiner for years. «Playing with Gardiner – explains Greco – I managed to reach a point that I would never have imagined. Gardiner asked a lot and yet gave a lot of trust.” The large audience at the Ridotto greeted the worthy fellow citizen with a standing ovation: a good start for this 41st edition of the Festival, which promises to be full of surprises.
