With twenty world premieres, mostly commissions from the Cantiere, four orchestras including the Haydn Orchestra, Orchestra della Toscana, Giovanile Italiana and Camerata Strumentale di Prato, with the two young conductors, Artistic and Musical, Mariangela Vacatello and Michele Gamba, engaged on several stages as performers, on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary, the Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte confirms itself as one of the most creative, transversal, experimental, popular and courageous realities in Europe, a true development of the revolutionary ideas of Hans Werner Henze, forerunner of the new spirit of so many festivals today. The full program is available in Italian and English on the website at the section 49° Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte with all the events of this year's edition.

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From Friday 12 July, the inexhaustible creativity of Cantiere 2024 will be brought to life with Opificio Sonoro's Sound Installations dedicated to Matter and Memory, followed by the unfailing programme for bands, which underlines the Cantiere's powerful didactic vein in this sense, active all year round, and with the great opening concert in Piazza Grande in Montepulciano, featuring the Orchestra della Toscana led by Alexander Lonquich, pianist, conductor, but above all a very fine German intellectual who has been linked to Italy and Tuscany for decades. With him is the multi-award-winning 20-year-old violinist Angela Tempestini, a growing talent at the Fiesole school with a layout between Mendelssohn and Schubert, the latter author on whom Lonquich is considered an absolute reference artist.

Then, on Saturday 13th, the traditional musical incursions and performances between art and nature will begin in the area to close the day in the 18th-century Teatro Poliziano with the Cantiere's new opera production, El Retablo de Maese Pedro, a one-act opera by Manuel de Falla enriched by the overture commissioned from composer Stefano Pierini Imágenes errantes for baritone and orchestra, with the Orchestra Camerata Strumentale di Prato conducted by Michele Gamba, today one of the most sought-after young conductors from La Scala in Milan to the Metropolitan in New York, here making his debut in the dual role of Music Director and eclectic artist. Presented for the first time in Seville in 1923, El Retablo de Maese Pedro is an extremely rare opera, inspired to De Falla by his friend Garcia Lorca, a great fan and himself an impresario of puppet shows, hence the setting of the opera, which combines in impeccable balance the Spanish folk tradition from the Middle Ages to the 20th century with an effect of great emotional impact. Direction, sets, costumes and lighting are by the Anagoor collective, founded in 2000 to give voice to theatrical forms in which performing art, philosophy and the hypermedia scene dialogue with free creativity.

Then the all-female path created by pianist and Artistic Director Mariangela Vacatello will open for her debut at the Cantiere with Io, Anna Dostoevskaya, a melologue on music for piano solo by Rachmaninov performed by Vacatello and with text and reciting voice by Maddalena Maggi, a film and theatre actress and director, already of established popularity. With two magnificent forty-year-olds at the head of Italy's most consolidated and challenging cross-arts happening, the Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte returns to set Montepulciano, the villages and nature in the Valdichiana, the green heart of the European Renaissance, a crossroads of cultures for over a millennium and today a coterie of energies and skills from all over the globe as in a great open-air salon.

Michele Gamba will instead return to the podium of the ensemble specially conceived for an original stage production of Arnold Schönberg's Pierrot Lunaire, then in the three appointments of the Mozart Series - Amadeus and the virtuosos, with the Orchestra Giovanile Italiana and at the piano a parade of the best Italian pianists such as Leonora Armellini, Mariangela Vacatello, Chiara Biagioli, Antonia de Pasquale, Alessandra Ammara, Serena Valluzzi: new cadenzas have been commissioned to young composers from the Accademia Santa Cecilia, while the lighting design is entrusted to the talents of the Guido Levi Lighting Lab. Chamber music concerts, often with the ensembles of the Orchestra Giovanile Italiana, the musical theatre show Oz. Il Mago della Città di Smeraldo (The Wizard of the Emerald City) by the Nuova Compagnia degli Arrischianti and a wide range of organ music that will highlight local instruments, the return of the Compagnia Cantiere Danza with the show Gershwin Postcards with choreography by Mauro de Candia, Manuel Magrini and Enrico Mirabassi on piano and the celebrated jazz musician Gabriele Mirabassi on clarinet, with the artistic coordination of Azzurra Di Meco and the support of Arte&BallettO, stands out.

The intriguing rendezvous with the timeless myth of Diego Armando Maradona Sinediez, music for feet in love will be held in the medieval cloister of the Montepulciano Fortress, with lyrics by Stefano Valanzuolo and music from jazz to Lucio Dalla.

There is also Canto Latino with the celebrated voice of soprano Gemma Bertagnolli and an unusual Händel series whose organ and orchestra concertos will be performed by Adriano Falcioni on two consecutive evenings in the monumental Temple of San Biagio with the Poliziana Orchestra and local choirs, conducted by Alessio Tiezzi. For contemporary music, the premiere of Alessandro Solbiati's chamber opera Il n'est pas comme nous and concerts entrusted to Opificio Sonoro directed by Marco Momi.

Finally, the ritual Closing Concert on Sunday 28 July in Piazza Grande in Montepulciano with the excellent Haydn Orchestra in co-production with the Haydn Foundation, Mariangela Vacatello at the piano and Michele Gamba on the podium, for a new artistic and musical direction that does not only spend itself in creativity and organisation, but gets into the action with its skills and experience of established and respected artists.

This is how Mariangela Vacatello describes this electrifying new experience: "In this year's Cantiere there will be shared space between young people and professionals, a human and cultural idea that is at the heart of the Cantiere utopia and that will be evident in the projects on Mozart and Händel and in the opera productions; I have very much looked forward to the residency of Opificio Sonoro, an ensemble with an international scope that seeks new listening codes and deals with acoustic, electronic and performed sound. The Cantiere this year also has projects where the presence of women is desired and sought after, so that in time there will no longer be barriers and different balances between genders."
Michele Gamba concludes: "Il Cantiere aims to be a workshop for the arts, hence the idea of creating a contact with a collective such as Anagoor; the idea is that the synergy between direction and musical direction is fulfilled. Then there is the intention to bring the public together with today's music, in the formula of the Cantiere that we want to renew in order to build bridges to the future, with many commissions of various sizes, from small-scale cadenza to musical theatre; the Cantiere is proof that today's music is as alive as ever and capable of communicating to a vast audience."