The Tuscan city of Siena is renowned for its beautiful medieval architecture and the Palio, its daredevil horse race around the central Piazza del Campo that takes place twice each summer. Musically, Siena was the birthplace of the great Italian baritone Ettore Bastianini, whose horse won the Palio for his contrada (ward) in July 1963. But Siena also boasts a classical music festival which, although it celebrates its tenth anniversary this summer, has origins stretching back a century, linked closely to the Accademia Chigiana.
“If Venice is the city of water, Siena is the city of stone,” relates Nicola Sani, composer and the artistic director of the Chigiana International Festival since its 2014 inception. “It’s a unique town. Like Venice, we don’t have any cars. For a medieval town, it is quite big. The Accademia Chigiana is very close to the main square (where the Palio takes place) and the big tower, the Torre del Mangia, which is our Big Ben! It has been signing the hours since the Middle Ages.”
Sani provides me with a potted history of the festival which dates back to 1923. “Count Guido Chigi Saracini, the founder of the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, started the concert season under the title Micat in Vertice, which is Latin for “shining on the top”. This was the motto of the Chigi family, who were one of the most important families in Italy, like the Borghese, Torlonia and Barberini. Count Chigi was one of the great patrons of the arts. He dedicated his life – and this palazzo, which has a huge art collection – to his passion and the first step was the creation in 1923 of the concert season, which we are still running.”
In 1932, Chigi initiated the summer academy, an advanced training academy, and its first artistic director was Alfredo Casella. In 1938 they became an international academy, then in 1939 he created the first Settimana musicale senese which was a short festival at the heart of the summer academy.” Among its achievements was its role in the Vivaldi Renaissance. “Vivaldi was literally rediscovered at Chigiana. The composers around Chigi here – Casella, Respighi, Pizzetti, Malipiero – started to perform these unknown operas and concert music.”
The festival very nearly foundered. After Chigi’s death in 1965, his estate was left to the Monte dei Paschi di Siena – the oldest bank in the world (1476) – which engaged itself to support the academy. But the collapse of the bank in 2014 put the festival in danger which is when Sani, then sovrintendente and artistic director of the Teatro Comunale in Bologna, was brought in to rescue it.
He identified “not just a problem of money, but also a cultural model that was not renewable. There’s Aspen Music Festival, Tanglewood, Verbier, Lucerne and Aix-en-Provence, all with summer academies which occupy the same cultural sector of advanced training, high specialisation music. It was important that we reset the academy into this Champion’s League of summer academies.”
With the support of the the Ministry of Culture and the region of Tuscany, Sani describes how a plural financial model mixing 52% private money (around half from the bank) and 48% public funding was struck to revitalise the festival. “Symbolically, given the role the academy played in the Vivaldi Renaissance, the first Chigiana International Festival opened in 2015 with former academy student Max Richter’s Vivaldi Recomposed!”
The festival runs for the full two months of the summer academy through July and August, featuring over 100 events. Sani describes his approach to programming: “Living in Berlin in the 1990s, I collaborated with Claudio Abbado on his work with the Berliner Philharmoniker, so I was very touched by his influence to create thematic seasons. These themes were taken up by many of the cultural institutions in Berlin: art galleries, cinemas, libraries, all in some way reflecting the theme of the season.
“When I arrived in Chigiana it was really a dream for me because I had the opportunity to establish this model. Every year I give the festival and the academy a topic, a theme, which is not meant to be a cage, but something that allows you to make connections. I have to do this within the academy’s resources – the students, the professors – so the challenge is to transform the energy and ideas into something that can be presented to the festival audience.”
And what a line-up of visiting professors! Daniele Gatti heads the conducting classes, Salvatore Accardo and Ilya Gringolts (violin), Tabea Zimmermann (viola), Salvatore Sciarrino (composition), Alessandro Carbonare (clarinet), Sara Mingardo (Baroque singing)... it’s an impressive roster.
“This year the topic is ‘Tracce’: ‘Traces’ or ‘Tracks’ – there’s a big ear as the symbol of the festival – exploring the relationship between various sound traces from Renaissance vocal music, to the sound architecture of the Baroque through to new perspectives shaped by new technologies and the spatiality of sound. This theme also concludes a trilogy which began with emerging from pandemic in 2022 (‘From Silence’) and the embracing of the word (‘Parola’) in 2023.”
Contemporary music plays a vital role. “Every year we have a composer at the centre of the festival. This year, it’s György Ligeti (previous editions have featured Kurtág, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Reich, Nono, Berio). Daniele Gatti has introduced Ramifications by Ligeti in his classes and will perform it in the final concert of the course, so the academy is breathing with the festival in the same ‘atmosphere’… to use another word linked to Ligeti!” This edition of the festival includes 28 of the Hungarian’s works.
Concerts don’t only take place in Siena, either, but are performed all over Tuscany, many in partnership with other festivals. One example is the concert given by the festival’s resident youth ensemble, Orchestra senzaspine from Bologna, which performs in the Abbazia di San Galgano, Chiusdino, a Gothic abbey without a roof, where Andrei Tarkovsky filmed Nostalghia.
Naturally, opera plays a part in La Chigiana. “We present three operas this season, with two from the academy: Don Pasquale with participants from Daniele Gatti’s course and The Turn of the Screw with participants from the singing course. The most exciting is the world premiere of The Butterfly Equation in collaboration with the Musiktheatertage Wien, which we are doing for the Puccini centenary. We commissioned the composer Thomas Cornelius Desi, who has based his work on the letters of Giacomo Puccini. It will feature five sopranos from our partners at the Mozarteum Salzburg, five pianists who are the Chigiana Keyboard Ensemble, which is another resident ensemble, and an actor. The stage direction is by Alessio Pizzech.
“The connection with Puccini is through his relationships with women but also through his opera Madama Butterfly. It starts with a TV talent show with five sopranos aspiring to sing the title role in Butterfly. There is an entertainer who is presenting the show but he turns out to be the son of Pinkerton! So rather than stage a Puccini opera, we are using Puccini as an opportunity to support a new creation and this is characteristic of La Chigiana.”
The festival invites a number of special guests, many of whom have a shared history in Siena. “In 2021, emerging from the pandemic, we wanted to create something new to celebrate the opportunity to listen to live music together again. Although there was still social distancing, we ‘threw the heart after the obstacle’, as we say, with a new format: the Concerto per l’Italia dedicated to all the people in Italy who had suffered immensely. We invited the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and Antonio Pappano to play in the main square. Ilya Gringolts was the soloist. It was a great moment in which everyone was motivated to begin a new era; the town supported us and RAI broadcast it on Rai Uno.
“We wanted to continue, so in 2022 came the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino with Zubin Mehta, who was a former academy student in the 1956 conducting class – where he met Abbado and Daniel Barenboim for the first time! In 2023, the Maggio returned with Gatti and our resident piano professor Lilya Zilberstein as soloist. This year, we invited the Filarmonica della Scala – playing in Siena for the first time in many years – to help celebrate our tenth anniversary, conducted by Myung-whun Chung, who was both a student and a teacher at the academy.”
The live audience of 5000 – with 3000 seated in the centre of the Piazza del Campo and another 2000 circling the square – is boosted to millions with the RAI broadcast, available to view on demand, Siena’s gift not just to Italy, but to the wider world.
Siena’s Chigiana International Festival runs for 5th July to 2nd September. Thomas Cornelius Desi’s The Butterfly Equation is on 24th August.
This article was sponsored by the Accademia Musicale Chigiana.
