On the occasion of the 32nd edition of the Festa della Musica, this year marked in Italy by the theme “The Voice of Places”, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Beirut is organizing a concert featuring opera arias and other Italian vocal works, performed by soprano Nadine Nassar, accompanied on the piano by Maestro Olga Bolun.
“Casta Diva and Luna Mediterranea” is a tribute to Mediterranean places and nights: to their suspended beauty, their mystery, and their unique ability to transform silence into music and memory into song.
For centuries, along the shores of the Mediterranean, in Lebanon as in Italy, the night has been a time of enchantment and contemplation, of nostalgia and love. It is the moment when the sea, the moon, and the human voice seem to speak the same language.
The concert journeys through this poetic universe with some of the most celebrated pages of Italian opera and Neapolitan song. The heroines of Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini give voice to longing, dreams, seduction, and melancholy, while Neapolitan melodies extend their emotional echo through an intimate, popular, and deeply Mediterranean song tradition.
Performed by Lebanese soprano Nadine Nassar, the program brings together the lyricism of Italian bel canto and the nocturnal sweetness of the Neapolitan tradition in a musical journey filled with lunar light, passion, and memory.
“Casta Diva and Mediterranean Moonlight” celebrates Mediterranean sensibility and that singular emotion born by the sea when the night itself becomes illuminated with poetry.