MITO SettembreMusica

With the twentieth edition of MITO SettembreMusica, Milan and Turin renew a cultural partnership that, year after year, has brought the two cities together: twenty years of music, listening, and dialogue among different places, audiences, and traditions, establishing itself as a model of best practices. This anniversary reaffirms the shared commitment that unites us in continuing to build, through culture, a common space—one in which two cities that play a central role in the country's economic and cultural life once again choose to symbolically transcend distance and boundaries.
This is a story that belongs to our cities and reflects a continuing commitment to public culture: bringing it into the places of everyday life and expanding audiences through opportunities for listening, learning, and connection.

The theme Harmony speaks clearly to this vocation: harmony as the celebration of differences and the desire to bring them together in balance at a time marked by tension, division, and conflict, reminding us through music that every voice finds its fullest meaning only in listening to another.
In this spirit, MITO SettembreMusica invites citizens, artists, and institutions alike to recognize the values of peace, civil coexistence, and shared responsibility.
We are living through challenging times: Music does not erase the challenges of the present, but it reminds us that no voice can find its fullest meaning in isolation, and that every community grows when it learns to listen to what is different from itself.

Under the new artistic leadership of Speranza Scappucci, the festival enters a new chapter in its history, with an even stronger focus on international openness and engagement with the present, while remaining true, as always, to the highest standards of artistic excellence.
Our heartfelt thanks go to her, to the artists, and to everyone who contributed in various ways to making this edition possible, as well as to the audience, whose enthusiasm and support for the festival continue year after year.

This year’s program clearly reflects the festival’s far-reaching presence throughout the two cities. MITO SettembreMusica unfolds across a wide range of venues: major theaters, concert halls, conservatories, churches, cultural centers, neighborhood spaces, and places dedicated to young people and education.
In this way, the festival helps shape a cultural landscape in which each venue becomes part of a single, citywide score.

May this twentieth edition offer host cities Milano and Torino a new opportunity to listen to each another, come together, and imagine the future together.

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There are anniversaries that matter less for the time they mark than for the journey they invite us to reflect upoNo. The twentieth edition of MITO SettembreMusica is one of those moments: an opportunity to come together, to look back on what has been built, and in doing so to renew the meaning of a project that continues to unite Milan and Turin in the creation and sharing of musical culture.
It was in 2007 that the two cities chose to join forces in creating a single major cultural initiative. Since then, the festival has accompanied generations of listeners, filled theaters, concert halls, churches, urban spaces, and more unconventional venues, bringing music both to audiences already seeking it out and to those encountering it for the very first time.

One of the great strengths of MITO SettembreMusica is that it is, above all, a shared endeavor.

Some time ago, during a chance encounter with one of the world’s most renowned solo sailors, I told him how much I admired the fact that he had crossed so many seas alone. “You know,” he replied, “it’s actually more important—and more difficult—to sail with someone else on board, because you have to engage with another persoNo. But you learn more, you discover new perspectives, and you go farther.”

The protagonist of the novels by the celebrated contemporary Greek writer Petros Márkarīs, whenever he embarks on a new undertaking, consults the Dimitrakos, the dictionary of the Greek language. So I, too, turned to an Italian dictionary and looked up the word “festival.”
Words, like music, sometimes take unexpected paths. They are born in one place, migrate elsewhere, and eventually return home. “Festival” is a word of Latin origin, rooted in the idea of celebration. It traveled first to France and then to England before making its way back to us. Along the way, its meaning broadened, though it lost some of the vitality that characterized it at the outset.

MITO SettembreMusica seeks to preserve—and, if possible, further develop—precisely those qualities of vitality that remain so essential, especially in an age marked by widespread fragmentatioNo.

The vision shared by Torino and Milano is a relational one: I am what I experience and what I am able to share with others. For this reason, as well, I am delighted by the beautiful words that the Artistic Director, Speranza Scappucci, has written for this edition: throughout them resonate ideas and expressions of closeness, shared foundations, harmony—and therefore Harmonia. This is the spirit of MITO SettembreMusica, a spirit that, it seems to me, is needed everywhere.
I truly feel both the impulse and the duty to thank Speranza Scappucci for her musical intelligence, for the sense of responsibility with which she has shaped this program, and for the great Passion that drives her.
Harmony captures with great clarity the spirit of this edition and translates this idea into a broad journey in which the great tradition engages in dialogue with the present; the symphonic dimension meets the voice; early music stands alongside new creation; great masters alternate with young performers and educational projects.
From the opening concerts at Teatro alla Scala and the Rai Auditorium through to the closing events, the festival moves across works that speak of memory, peace, spirituality, energy, transmission, and the future. It is a program that confirms MITO SettembreMusica’s international vocation and, at the same time, its deep roots in both host cities.

I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone who, over the past twenty years, has brought us to where we are today, and to all those who are working on this edition—not out of obligation, but out of conviction and feeling.
My thanks also go to the two organizations that make this festival possible: the Fondazione per la Cultura Torino and the Fondazione I Pomeriggi Musicali. Their daily work is the solid—and often unseen—foundation that allows artistic vision to become reality, that gives shape to projects, and that brings artists and audiences together.

We will strive to live up to our tradition and to twenty years of vitality, and we will also seek—and this is a commitment—to move forward together through the exchange of different ideas, listening, experiencing, and carrying with us, step by step, the words of a beautiful poem by Antonio Machado: “…there is no path, the path is made by walking…”

Alberto Meomartini
President of MITO SettembreMusica

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MITO SettembreMusica / Twentieth Edition

Forty-ninth edition of SettembreMusica,
the festival founded in 1978 in Torino
by then Commissioner of Culture Giorgio Balmas.

Thanks to all those who have worked so hard to make this festival a reality.
Special thanks go out to all MITO SettembreMusic partners, sponsors and musical and cultural organizations.