• Piovani won an Oscar for his music for the film La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful)
• Piovani has composed the music for more than 180 films in a career that has also seen him work with the famous Italian director Federico Fellini
• We will hear the piece he composed to mark the 700th anniversary of the death of the poet Dante Alighieri
• Dante’s The Divine Comedy is one of the greatest works of world literature

Programme:
N. Piovani: Suite Taviani
Fiorile (Flowering)
Il sole anche di notte (Sun at Night)
La notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the St. Laurence)
Good Morning Babilonia (Good Morning Babylonia)
N. Piovani: Ballata from La Vita nuova
N. Piovani: Suite from original movie soundtrack La vita è bella
N. Piovani: Suite Fellini
Intervista (Interview)
La voce della luna (The voice of the Moon)
Ginger & Fred

Ljubljana welcomes the celebrated Italian film score composer, pianist and conductor Nicola Piovani, the creator of music for more than 150 films, including the last three films by the great director Federico Fellini (Ginger and Fred, 1986, Intervista 1987 and The Voice of the Moon, 1990) and Roberto Benigni’s classic La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful), for which he won the 1998 Academy Award for Original Dramatic Score. Piovani has been writing music for films since 1968. In 2008 he was made a Chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in recognition of his artistic achievements. In the first part of the concert on the Festival stage, we will hear a cantata written by Piovani to mark the 700th anniversary of the death of one of Italy’s most important poets, Dante Alighieri, which falls this year. This work attempts to capture, in the staves of its score, a splinter of that light that continues to illuminate the mind of the reader of Dante’s immortal lines in the third millennium. When writing the piece, Piovani conjured up an image of the young Dante, so distant from us in time yet still in some sense our contemporary, thanks to the power of his timeless poetry. The second part of the concert will consist of music from La vita è bella and the films of Fellini and the Taviani brothers. Piovani will conduct the recently founded FVG Orchestra, a symphony orchestra established by Italy’s Friuli Venezia Giulia region with the mission of bringing together the many strands of the region’s orchestral heritage. Joining the orchestra as soloist will be the soprano Annamaria Dell’Oste, a regular performer on the world’s opera stages who has worked with notable conductors such as Roberto Abbado, Zubin Mehta and Riccardo Muti.