The “Unexpected Italy: a Celebration of Italian Culture” festival, 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 program dedicated to Italian culture and arts in the US capital.
The Festival offers many concerts to celebrate the wide range of Italian music of 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 Gianandrea Noseda, Music Director of the National Symphony Orchestra, pointed out 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 Italy’s Ambassador Armando Varricchio underlined how, thanks to the fruitful collaboration with the Kennedy Center, the Festival “represents a unique moment to celebrate Italian culture and its contributions to the progress of humanity.”
The Festival is the highlight of the Italian cultural offer in Washington in this first part of 2019. A real ‘Italian spring‘ that includes also the exhibition at the National Art Gallery for the 500th anniversary of the birth of Tintoretto, the ‘Queens of Egypt’ exhibition organized at the National Geographic Museum, in collaboration with the Egyptian Museum of Turin, and the exhibition of Enrico David at the Hirshhorn Museum.
Ph. cover: F Delventhal
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