The Turku Music Festival Christmas concert in 2024 is a joint production with the Fondazione Luciano Pavarotti

The Turku Music Festival Christmas concert in 2024 is a joint production with the Fondazione Luciano Pavarotti.

“Nicoletta Mantovani and I met in Florence in 2016 when she was Deputy Mayor. We talked a lot about opera and classical music. In 2017, the annual meeting and award gala of the international Europa Nostra world heritage network was held in Turku, thanks to the Deputy Chair of Europa Nostra Finland, Benito Casagrande, and the City of Turku. The Turku Music Festival was honoured to be asked to produce the musical programme for the award gala, which we did in collaboration with the Fondazione Luciano Pavarotti and the Matti Salminen Fund. It was wonderful to welcome Plácido Domingo, Chair of Europa Nostra, bass singer Matti Salminen, Nicoletta Mantovani and Pavarotti’s daughter Alice to Turku. The idea of continuing our collaboration with the Fondazione Luciano Pavarotti was floated at the time, and now, after the pandemic, we are happy to be producing a concert together again. This time we are partnered in Finland by the Päivi and Paavo Lipponen Fund. At this concert, talented young opera singers from the Fondazione are joined on stage by baritone Gabriel Kivivuori Sereno, who recently appeared at the Young Soloists Concert of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and is singer-in-residence of the Päivi and Paavo Lipponen Fund, and soprano Emma Kajander, who makes her début at the Finnish National Opera this autumn,” says Liisa Ketomäki, Managing Director of the Turku Music Festival Foundation. 

"It makes me very happy and proud to be able to return to Turku and renew a precious collaboration that began a few years ago. I would like to express my gratitude to the Turku Music Festival, and Liisa Ketomäki in particular, for this wonderful opportunity. All of us at the Pavarotti Foundation feel committed to turn Luciano's dream true: to provide a stage for young singers and give the audience the chance to become familiar with opera, the art form that he considered most complete, exciting and sublime. The concert on December 14 intends to celebrate one of Luciano's favorite composers, Giacomo Puccini, whose centenary of the death falls in 2024. Luciano debuted in 1961 interpreting one of Puccini's most famous operas, La Bohème, and closed his career 43 years later with another of his operas, Tosca. Puccini was one of the Italian composers who most assimilated different musical cultures into his scores, involving the public with sounds and aesthetic horizons from faraway countries. In this sense, the composer can be defined as a contemporary artist, able of transcending linguistic and cultural barriers through operas speaking a universal language. Perhaps for this very reason Luciano loved him so much. Interpreting Puccini's most famous arias will be some young talents that the Pavarotti Foundation has selected and supports  in building a career; they will also be joined on stage by two emerging Finnish talents, reinforcing the message of music as a bridge to bring together peoples and cultures", says Nicoletta Mantovani.

The programme of the Christmas concert includes Italian opera repertoire popularised by the late Luciano Pavarotti and Christmas music. The programme is being planned by Paolo Andreoli, Artistic Director of the Fondazione Luciano Pavarotti, and will be finalised in early autumn 2024. Tickets for the Christmas concert go on sale in all Lippupiste sales channels on Wednesday 15 May at 09.00.