51st International Festival of Contemporary Music

　　61 composers from around the world with 17 commissions, 25 world premieres and 22 Italian premieres, will be the focus in Venice from 4th to 13th October for the International Festival of Contemporary Music, directed by Giorgio Battistelli. An international jury will instead award the Golden Lion for music of the present, chosen from the music and musicians invited to the Festival.

　　 The original programme proposed by the Klangforum Wien comprises three concerts, plus a highly unusual "symphony" of images and sounds entitled Free Radicals; and a masterclass dedicated to composers, instrumentalists and conductors.

　　The prestigious award for lifetime achievement, symbolised by the Biennale's Golden Lion, will this year be assigned to Giacomo Manzoni.

　　While the distinctive feature of a festival, and of the Biennale Musica in particular, derives from the wish to create a new 'catalogue' for the public of the future, Made in Italy is a project constituting an entire section of the Festival. Shared between the Biennale and the Compagnia per la Musica in Roma - a private charity that provides support for cultural initiatives in the field of music - the project comprises 14 Italian composers who have been commissioned to write instrumental pieces for the finest ensembles, which are also Italian - Icarus, Divertimento, and Algoritmo Ensemble, conducted by Erasmo Gaudiomonte, Sandro Gorli and Marco Angius, all authoritative performers of new music. Made in Italy will be a sort of 'Italian Pavilion', a panorama of music today in the country and a foundation for the future.

　　There will be two resident ensembles for this edition of the Festival: Klangforum Wien, awarded the Golden Lion for music of the present, attributed to its founder, Beat Furrer, for Fama in 2006, and musikFabrik, interpreter of the most experimental of new music.

　　The two ensembles will be flanked by other groups offering equally rich programmes, including the Ensemble Recherche, the Jack Quartet, and the Nieuw Ensemble, which for its second concert will be making use of heterogeneous worlds of sounds - from the Japan of Misato Mochizuki to the Korea of Unsuk Chin, to the Arab culture of Haddad Saed from Jordan and the Israeli one of Daniel Landau, and on to the Kuwaiti (but of Indonesian origin) one of Rashidah Ibrahim and the Chinese Leilei Tian. The presence of these different cultures and languages highlights a topical theme which music cannot avoid: the confrontation between different musical works reflects tensions or openness between cultures that may be very different, a world, in which differences can amalgamate but also be increased; they can unite, but also divide. There will also be a series of veritable monographs appearing during the course of the programme.