The Bolzano Festival Bozen has come to represent one of the most multifarious and interesting events of the summer's cultural landscape. Promising young talents are given the opportunity for encounters and exchanges with well established artists.
The Bolzano Festival Bozen offers a programme that stretches from baroque to contemporary music and also embraces the rich musical heritage of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Due to the unique collaboration of Bolzano's major cultural establishments, the BFB is today enjoying the support of the most varied musical groups. One of the main themes of this year's BFB is set, once again, by the contribution of the most outstanding youth orchestras from across Europe. The European Union Youth Orchestra and the Gustav Mahler Youthorchestra, under the direction of Vasily Petrenko, Sir Colin Davis, and the much-anticipated Patrick Lange, will perform works from the Romantic Period and the first half of the 19th century. The results will no doubt be some extraordinary experiences of Hector Berlioz, Maurice Ravel and Serghej Rachmaninov's works. The two violin concertos by Ludwig van Beethoven and Jean Sibelius, performed by the soloists Nikolaj Znaider and Carolina Kurkowski Perez, will form one of the highlights of this year's festival.
The Bolzano String Academy and the bassoonist Sergio Azzolini will dedicate their performances entirely to the works of Johann Christian Bach.
Antiqua Facing East will explore rare musical treasures by Eastern European and Middle Eastern composers and musicians. Using original baroque instruments, the Soloists of Catherine the Great, the trio Bitar-Rezk-Lakchour and the Bolzano Baroque Orchestra will perform works by German and Italian composers of the 16th and 17th century such as Giuseppe Tartini, Alessandro Stradella and Johann Sebastian Bach, alongside Russian, Croatian and Bohemian baroque music and old Iberian works.
The 57th edition of the International Piano Competition and Piano Festival Ferruccio Busoni offers a chance to see the world premiere of two of the pianist and composer's operas, performed by the extraordinary talents of Marc Andrè Hamelin, Alfred Brendel, Grigory Sokolov, and the child prodigy Kit Armstrong. In a special symposium there will be a presentation of a previously unseen collection of letters by the artist Ferruccio Busoni.
As tradition demands, the 24 finalists of the Busoni competition will participate in a pre-selection anticipating the 2009 finals in an exciting piano marathon. Two artists, whose careers have been intimately linked with the Busoni competition, will close the festival: Lilya Zilberstein and Alexander Kobrin, the 1987 and 1999 winners. The Haydn Orchestra, directed by Arthur Fagen, will accompany the two soloists in their recitals of Prokofiev's concerto No. 3 and the rarely performed concerto No. 2 by Tchaikovsky.
The Gustav Mahler Academy, which celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2008, offers young talents the opportunity to perfect their art with the help of recognised musicians, soloists and members of some of the most renowned orchestras in the world, in accordance with the work of the Gustav Mahler Orchestra. The Bolzano Festival Bozen 2008 offers a selection of concerts in the most diverse venues across the city of Bolzano, from the Palazzo Mercantile to the Conservatory. One of this year's offerings, for example, will see an appearance of the academy's orchestra with the Singspiel Bastien et Bastienne by W. A. Mozart in an inventive mixture of real life and animation video. The final concert, performed by the academy's orchestra under the artistic direction of Jürgen Kussmaul, is dedicated entirely to German music: from Richard Strauss to Johannes Brahms, to the world premiere of Silver Lining for 23 string soli, composed by the young composer Frank Zabel.