MITO Settembre Musica - Torino Milano - Festival Internazionale della Musica

The MITO
SettembreMusica Vocation

MITO SettembreMusica is a music festival born of the will of two great cities committed to developing various forms of cooperation, aimed at a vast listening audience made up of the culturally adroit and newcomers alike.
Indeed, variegation of the MITO SettembreMusica public is increased by facilitated access to performances, more than half of which boast free admission, as well as by the fact that MITO SettembreMusica brings the music to the people - which is to say, concerts are held not only in traditional venues, but also in locations which, while being particularly suited to live music performances, do not often host such events, such as churches, courtyards, cloisters and museums.
This year, MITO SettembreMusica gets under way September 1, at La Scala in Milano, with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, and concludes in Torino September 25.
MITO SettembreMusica 2008 promises 25 days of music in Milano and Torino, featuring more than 200 concerts scheduled pretty much around the clock. Considering the variety of musical genres presented, some overlapping may occur. But it’s nice to know that at the same time there’s live music being played at contemporary and baroque concerts, and concert-goers have only to choose which refined form of entertainment entices them at that particular moment. Yet, within this apparent anarchy, the many forms of music flow along precise currents. While each one of us is free to follow his or her own musical interests, according to one’s own peculiar and ingrained habits and predilections, I would like to suggest to the music lovers of both cities, sure to be enraptured by some of the world’s greatest orchestras, to break the mold by opening up windows which usually remain closed to them. Take in and enjoy the musical scenery! We serve up sounds from the Gypsies of Rajasthan who, after traveling half the world, wound up in Andalusia to create Flamenco.
A few blocks down the road there’s the Gregorian Choir of Paris, with the intact purity of the dawn of our own musical civilization. Sometimes the old and new walk hand-in-hand. You’ll hear it for yourself at a concert featuring music history’s oldest requiem, composed by Ockeghem, which we dedicate to the memory of Karlheinz Stockhausen; or Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, which on October 6 of the year 1600 inaugurated in Florence the grand journey of musical theater - a journey that continues to this day, as shown by Harrison Birtwistle’s The Last Supper, George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill, and Luca Francesconi’s Gesualdo considered as a Murderer, all of which appear on the MITO SettembreMusica 2008 program.
If music has the power to reflect a virtually infinite range of moods, from studiousness to revelry, from contemplation to triumphant celebration, as it so often alternates from one extreme to another, then the MITO ettembreMusica 2008 program of musical events promises experiences not to be missed.
The MITO SettembreMusica festival inspires on a great number of fronts, but it is the fervor with which MITO SettembreMusica welcomes vast and variegated audiences that this festival reveals its truest and most authentic vocation - a revelation of our society’s longing for culture which is much more idespread than commonly thought.

Enzo Restagno
Artistic Director