THE SOUNDS OF THE DOLOMITES: THE BEST OF MUSIC AND MOUNTAINS
Here are twenty-five concerts set in the most fascinating sceneries of the Trentino Dolomites. Among the protagonists of this summer’s festival there are many important names of the rock, jazz, classical and folk music scene: from Mario Brunello to Gidon Kremer, from Paolo Fresu to Ginevra di Marco, and - among others - a legend like Graham Nash or a cult author like Grant-Lee Phillips. Artists like Maria Pia Devito, Avi Vital, Isabelle Faust and Teresa Salgueiro will also be present.
The Sounds of the Dolomites festival is back. So is the Campiglio Special Week, after its extraordinary 2017 success, with the same great aim to unite great interpreters and innovation. The week with Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica is one of the three special projects to be presented within the Sounds of the Dolomites, and that also includes the meeting between jazz artist Paolo Fresu and local folk band Musega de Pozza for a new interpretation of the music of the mountain and, finally, a journey through a century, born of an idea of Mario Brunello and Alessandro Baricco, which is going to unite individual destinies with war and music.
Year after year, the festival offers a winning combination of enchanting places and unforgettable experiences thanks to a consolidated, yet never repetitive formula that includes great musicians performing among the most beautiful peaks of the Trentino Dolomites. New ideas and music travel along paths and mountain faces every year, new scenarios are added every year, and the desire to experiment with new forms of music. And every year, thousands of people discover the mountain as a place of wonder and encounter, as an experience to remember and, above all, to live as you would do in no other place.
This is the context in which the festival - now in its 24th edition - comes to life this year as well, offering twenty-five musical events ranging from classical music to jazz, from world music to songwriting, involving musicians and artists from all around the world. Participants, whether interpreters or audience, are asked to be protagonists and to reach the places of concerts on foot, sharing paths among alpine pastures and woods. Musicians carry their instruments on their shoulders, all the way to clearings, hollows, and rock formations where at noon – or at dawn, at 6:00 am - they will perform unique and unrepeatable (shared) meetings between creativity, nature and its silences, sounds, colors and people.
The 2018 edition of “Sounds of the Dolomites” is once again focused on proposing a mix of musical genres, events and projects that are able to satisfy the most diverse tastes, intertwining music, storytelling and representation, with the usual attention to quality and research.
The festival opening, on 30 June, is entrusted to a name that certainly needs no introduction: Graham Nash, at the Micheluzzi Refuge in Val di Fassa. A much sought-after popular appointment for all fans of American music and music in general, since Graham Nash, performing both solo and with David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Neil Young, has marked the music scene from 1969 onwards, with a continuous dialogue between rock, folk, pop, songwriter songs and even jazz.
Maria Pia Devito & Ensemble Burnogualà come from a lot closer, but they. reconstruct a real journey through time and tradition. They will greet the sunrise in the event L’Alba delle Dolomiti (Dawn in the Dolomites) at 6:00 am on Col Margherita, in Val di Fassa, leading the public through dances, sounds, carnival cycles, serenades and compositions - like the Moresche by Orlande de Lassus – as well as through languages, dialects, improvisations and even imitations of instruments and animal verses.
There will also be many appointments with great classical music, like the one with the all-female quartet (28 August, in La Porta, Val di Fiemme) comprising Isabelle Faust – a world famous violinist and another three exceptional performers like Kristin von der Goltz, Anne Katharina Schreiber and Danusha Waskiewicz.
The classical music that opens up to experimentations, hybrid compositions and genre intersections, that knows how to dialogue with time and space, and that draws on other creative languages, is at the centre of a second special project, a real “festival within the festival”. It is the Campiglio Special Week, returning from 16 to 27 July, after the extraordinary success of last summer, to animate various places in Val Rendena with performances and events held in open spaces, as well as in mountain dairies and historic halls. The protagonists are, once again, Mario Brunello and Kremerata Baltica with Gidon Kremer and Andrei Pushkarev, who have certainly not run out of their irrepressible ability to experiment and get involved.
The “Sounds of the Dolomites” festival could not forego its traditional “musical Trek”, set in the Pale di San Martino group, with cellist Mario Brunello and famous mountaineer and climber Maurizio Zanolla (known as Manolo) as protagonists. A three-day event, from 6 to 8 July, in which musical and narrative moments will alternate, leading to a final event open to everyone, on 8 July, at the Rosetta Giovanni Pedrotti Refuge, on the Pale di San Martino.
All concerts will start at noon, with the exception of the dawn performances (6:00 am). Some events require paid admission, and are open to a limited number of people. The trekking event requires a paid admission (€ 360) and is open to a limited number of participants. Reservations by telephone only, from 7 May, by calling + 39 347 4944220 / 348 2222790