Bedford Music Club launches festival celebrating Italian culture

Bedford Music Club has launched a news festival celebrating Italian culture across the Bedfordshire town in April 2024. Bella Ciao! A celebration of Italian culture will celebrate Italy’s contribution to music: from opera to jazz and beyond. Running from 15 to 27 April, the festival is set to feature a series of concerts alongside films, talks and educational engagement.

Curated by composer Duncan Fraser, the festival kicks off on 15 April with a screening of award-winning Italian film Cinema Paradiso before a chat on 19 April with double bassist and I Musicanti founder Leon Bosch and festival-commissioned composer Valentina Ciardelli prepares audiences for a performance of Italian chamber string classics, then the De Parys Sextet presents a light-night programme of works inspired by Florence including Five Souvenirs a new work created for the festival by Ciardelli.

Bedford Music Club chair Ian Rowlands said: ‘Like many local music societies, audiences for Bedford Music Club concerts have been in the doldrums for some time – although they did recover quite quickly to immediate pre-Covid levels… We looked long and hard at our data and concluded that the status quo was no longer an option. So we approached Duncan Fraser and asked him to curate a concentrated themed festival – moving away decisively from the old model of six monthly concerts. The rationale was two-fold. First, we’ve concluded that our charitable objectives need to be reframed around the development of new audiences otherwise we will inevitably perish.  That means trying out new models and finding new ways to engage and draw people in to classical music, including working with schools on education projects. The second point is that by concentrating events into a short festival, we can make better use of our overheads. The fact that we’ve found it relatively easy to attract external funding for Bella Ciao! suggests that these arguments have a wider resonance.’

The new festival takes its name from Italian protest folk song Bella Ciao. Originally sung by workers in the paddy fields of Northern Italy in protest against harsh working conditions, the song was then adopted as an anthem of opposition to Nazism and fascism during the Italian resistance and the liberation of Italy and continues to be sung as an anthem of resistance today.

Across the wider festival audiences can expect to experience Monteverdi Madrigals performed by I Fagliolini, Jazz by Duo Petti, Italian Baroque by Florilegium and a performance of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons by students from the Royal College of Music. Bedford Town Band will accompany singers Andrea Tweedale, Harry Bagnall, Lottie Greenhow and Matthew Palmer in a programme of Verdi, Puccini, Rossini and more as part of a concert which will also see teenagers who in 1973 were filmed by the BBC singing Arrivederci Roma in Bedford reunited to perform over half a century later.