A Music Festival with a theme for EXPO 2015 and the Concerts at the Castello Sforzesco

From June to November 2015 the 800 MUSICA Association, which has been active both in Italy and abroad for a number of years and organizes an annual Festival of 19th Century Music, the ‘800MusicaFestival, in collaboration with several important bodies among which is the Museum of Musical Instruments at Castello Sforzesco in Milan, will offer a rich programme.

The Association will also organize three concerts together with the Antonio Carlo Monzino Foundation, in the Sale Panoramiche of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, featuring soloists of the highest level.

The importance of Western music, and not just that of Italy, will be highlighted by a series of concerts with works of significant and lesser known, but nonetheless attractive or relevant composers from an artistic, historical, philological perspective of nineteenth-century music will be featured.

The Italian Bel Canto style, in the transcriptions for various instruments, will be one of the key themes in this series of concerts.

The success of the opera inspired the composers of instrumental music to come close to this model of vocal score, proposing transcribed works or instrumental pieces in a similar style.

The idea that the arts were finally part of a society as the process of radical transformation took hold in the saloons of the time.

This fed not only into the appearance of the most simple and sublime ornamentation but also, with the lesson of Romanticism, became a spur for the effort to consolidate the values of the struggle for independence and freedom of peoples and nations.

The artistic representation of rise and triumph of the bourgeoisie (and capitalism) saw in music an expression of particular importance coloured by immediacy of language, but devoid of cultural mediation.

The essence of musical rhetoric, in the positive sense of the term, often influenced by the literary one, is acknowledged today as a convincing and consistent means of attracting a growing audience.

The spirit of immateriality and impermanence in the live performance is an intangible asset that expresses the wealth of human emotions from time immemorial.

Marco Battaglia