(ANSA) - ROME, MAR 1 - Riccardo Muti and the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra have renewed their commitment to promote music and help Italy's theatres by contributing to keep them 'virtually open' with a tour organised by the Ravenna Festival.
    The tour will cross Italy from north to south, with concerts in Bergamo, Naples and Palermo that will be streamed online for free on March 21, 26 and 28 respectively.
    The event at Bergamo's Donizetti theatre is a gift from BPER Banca to the city and it will feature the Don Pasquale Symphony and Beethoven's Eroica.
    It will be broadcast by BPER Banca's site.
    In Naples Muti and the Cherubini Orchestra will perform the symphony from Mercadante's I Due Figaro and Schubert's Symphony No. 9.
    This show was made possible thanks to collaboration with the Napoli Teatro Festival, which will play host to it on its website.
    The web TV of Palermo's Teatro Massimo will screen Schubert's Symphony No. 3 and Dvořák's From the New World Symphony.
    The three concerts will remain available for 30 days after they are first broadcast thanks to collaboration with RMMUSIC.
    It will also be possible to access them via Ansa.it thanks to a partnership with the agency that is part of the 'ANSA per la Cultura' (ANSA for Culture) project, as well as via ravennafestival.live.
    March 21, the first day of spring, was chosen for the Bergamo concert in a message of hope that comes a year after the first COVID-19 lockdown and is a sign of the attention BPER Banca has for an area that suffered so much because of the coronavirus.
    Riccardo Muti celebrated the 50th anniversary of the start of his career at the Teatro Donizetti in 2016 with the Don Pasquale Symphny.
    At the time he said this was because "I want to leave everyone with a sense of hope, a smile and a laugh".
    Today that desire seems all the more urgent and necessary.
    The homage to Bergamo composer Donizetti is doubly meaningful as Muti has a deep bond with Don Pasquale.
    The intrinsic value of the opera, which is the finishing line for a great tradition, that of the Neapolitan school and of Mozart, is on top of a personal factor - this was the first work directed by Muti in Salzburg at the invitation of Herbert von Karajan.
    The programme at the Donizetti is completed by Symphony No. 3, Beethoven's powerful Eroica, which features a funeral march of solemn melancholy infused with the ideals of equality, liberty and fraternity.
    The concert, which will be recorded on March 10, will be available from March 21 on bper.it, Ansa.it and ravennafestival.live.
    The deep love and constant commitment Muti has shown in promoting the rediscovery of the composers and works of the Neapolitan school and their fundamental contribution to European musical history could not fail to be the star in Naples.
    The programme of the concert at the Teatro Mercadante, which is also a taster for the 2021 Napoli Teatro Festival, opens with the Spanish Symphony that Saverio Mercadante composed for I Due Figaro.
    The manuscript was discovered in Madrid in 2009 by Turin scholar Paolo Cascio; I Due Figaro was created for the Spanish capital in 1826 to a libretto by Felice Romani.
    The dive into the opera world is counterposed by the symphonic universe, with Franz Schubert's Symphony No.9 in C major D 944, the 'Great' work composed between 1825 and 1826, but not performed in public until 1839, when it was directed by Mendelssohn after Schumann discovered it in the author's papers.
    The concert, which will be registered on March 19, will be available from March 26 on live.napoliteatrofestival.it, cultura.regione.campania.it, Ansa.it and ravennafestival.live.
    Schubert also features in Palermo, the last part of this tour, this time with Symphony No.3 in D major, D 200.
    Here Muti will be awarded honorary citizenship of the city for his work to promote the values of peace and communion between peoples via the universal language of music.
    Composed by Schubert in 1815, a few months after his 18th birthday, Symphony No.3 was also performed publicly for the first time much later, in London in 1881. The musical itinerary ends with a story of social integration.
    In 1892 Antonín Dvořák was invited by arts patron Jeannette Thurber to direct the New York National Conservatory, one of the first schools to admit women and African Americans. Having come into contact with Native American music and African-American spirituals, the composer combined two folk traditions, the Czech and American ones, in his Symphony No. 9 in E minor, "From the New World", Op. 95, B. 178 - a look towards the future.
    The concert will be recorded on March 21 and will be available from March 28 on the theatre's web TV, which can be accessed via theteatromassimo.it home page, and via Ansa.it and ravennafestival.live. (ANSA).