The festival “Unexpected Italy: a Celebration of Italian Culture” organized by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in collaboration with the Italian Embassy and the Italian Cultural Institute, is the highlight of the rich Italian cultural program in the US capital. The Festival, which will take place from May 3 to June 1, was presented by Armando Varricchio, Italy’s Ambassador, Deborah Rutter, President of the Kennedy Center, and Maestro Gianandrea Noseda, Music Director of the National Symphony Orchestra, during an event at Villa Firenze, attended by the main cultural institutions of Washington, the press and a large audience of lovers of Italian culture and art.
A month of concerts to celebrate the wide range of Italian music belonging to all genres, and to offer the American public an opportunity to experience less known and less familiar aspects of Italian culture. Opera, symphonic music, pop, jazz and folk ballads are part of a program that ranges from Rossini’s Stabat Mater to Puccini’s Tosca, from Vinicio Capossela to the voice of Simona Molinari.
Maestro Noseda recalled that the aim of the Festival is “to bring the American public closer to an unexpected Italy, less known but equally fascinating and surprising”, while the Ambassador underlined how “the Festival appointment represents a unique moment to celebrate Italian culture and its contributions to the progress of humanity, thanks to the fruitful collaboration with the Kennedy Center.”
The Festival is the highlight of the Italian cultural offer in Washington in this first part of 2019. A real “Italian spring” the Ambassador pointed out, as he reminded the audience of the exhibition at the National Art Gallery for the 500th anniversary of the birth of Tintoretto, the exhibition “Queens of Egypt” organized at the National Geographic Museum, in collaboration with the Egyptian Museum of Turin and the exhibition of Enrico David at the Hirshhorn Museum.
The program of the Festival “Unexpected Italy: a Celebration of Italian Culture” is available at the following links:
