The renowned Festival of the Two Worlds in the Umbrian town of Spoleto has a better program than ever lined up for its annual two-week extravaganza of music, theatre and opera, organisers say. Speaking at a presentation for this year's celebration, artistic director Giorgio Ferrara listed the acts attending and set out his view of the festival. ''The medieval city of Spoleto, which is a cradle for the Italian tradition of arts and crafts, will once again become a site for staging original acts, dreamed up for the occasion,'' he said. ''The festival will extend its efforts to showcase youthful talent and new, meaningful performances, while once again confirming its prestigious position in the international spotlight''. This year's event runs from June 26 until July 7 and will open with an inaugural concert dedicated to music by late Italian-American composer and festival founder, Gian Carlo Menotti performed by the Milan Verdi Symphonic Orchestra and conducted by James Conlan. This will be followed by a performance of Giacomo Puccini's Gianni Schicchi directed by filmmaker Woody Allen. The filmmaker's directorial opera debut met with critical acclaim when it was first performed in Los Angeles last year. The other operatic event scheduled for the festival is the 1925 musical comedy Mozart, a pastiche of the composer's early works, with a libretto by late French director and actor Sacha Guitry.
The dance section of the festival will offer an unusual combination of works by three of the world's greatest choreographers, Alexei Ratmansky, Christofer Wheeldon and Wayne McGregor, who will oversee performances by 50 dancers. German choreographer Pina Bausch, a leading influence in the development of Tanztheater dance, will offer the first Italian staging of her latest work, an eerie, fluid dreamscape entitled Bamboo Blues. The US avant-garde stage director and playwright Robert Wilson, who has been called the world's ''foremost vanguard theatre artist'', will bring two Samuel Beckett plays to Spoleto. Wilson directs Happy Days, starring Adriana Asti, and directs and acts in Krapp's Last Tape.
From Italy, legendary Italian director Luca Ronconi will stage Anton Chekhov's The Seagulls.
The closing event will be a traditional concert in Piazza Duomo, this year featuring music by George Gershwin, conducted by Wayne Marshall. The Festival of Two Worlds was created 51 years ago as a summer music and opera event in the central Umbrian city of Spoleto.
It has since expanded to included dance, drama, visual arts and roundtable discussions.
For more information on this summer's program visit www.festivaldispoleto.it, the English language version of which will be open from May 6.
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