One of the best occasions to visit Sermoneta with its imposing Caetani Castle is the Pontino Music Festival that annually brings together established and young artists who play from jazz to classical, with a particular focus on contemporary music.
The festival lasts about a month and is a meeting opportunity for composers, musicologists, and scholars who compare their experiences to the entertainment of the public.
Every year the International Music Campus organizes courses of instrumental excellence and musical interpretation that are held by top teachers and attracts students from all over the world who come to Sermoneta into an environment that combines art, nature and Italian lifestyle.
The musicians participating in the Campus are entrusted with 4 final concerts in the splendid setting of the Caetani Castle of Sermoneta. There are solo concerts, duos, quartets, trios, ensembles, orchestras, chamber groups for the enjoyment of Italian and foreign spectators.
The festival opens with a large musical party with free admission in which a band or an orchestra plays popular music. Then the festival immediately goes live with the International Meetings of Contemporary Music that take place at the castle.
Every year these meetings are dedicated to a different musical theme: for example, the string quartet or the piano duo with other instruments. The concerts hosted in the meetings are introduced by public conversations with the musicians in which the transformation of the formations over the centuries is discussed.
During the entire month of July, the festival program continues with events in which the key players are soloists, chamber ensembles and orchestras that also present the first performances of important masters of the past. Listen also to first Italian performances, reprise works by important composers both from yesterday and contemporary, absolute novelties and rarities.
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Picture by Cesare Galanti[/caption]
Special appointments are dedicated to the voice accompanied by various instruments: for example organ with voice, guitar with voice. In the castle there are itinerant tours with a musical ensemble whose reciting voice guides the audience in the magic of the castle sites to immerse visitors in medieval life.
In the magical Pantanello Natural Park, close to the nearby Gardens of Ninfa, a special event is held that combines music and nature. An evening concert of the piano repertoire with music by great classical composers, such as an evening dedicated to birds or that of the homage to the forest.
The Festival closes with another special evening with the National Orchestra of Italian Musical High Schools that plays a fun and popular repertoire ranging from Beethoven to Morricone. Every year the core of the orchestra is the result of the orchestral workshop held in the Campus, where many selected students are involved from among the fine talents present in the Music High Schools of our country.
The Pontino Music Festival was founded in 1963, by the last descendant of the historic Caetani family, to host young musicians from all over the world in the Castello Caetani of Sermoneta.
Since 1972 the Festival has been directed out by the Foundation Campus Internazionale di Musica di Latina which has made it one of the most vital and important initiatives in the province of Latina.
The artistic choices and the charm of the historical places have attracted and continue to attract to the Pontino Festival some of the most important artists: Bruno Canino, Gaspar Cassadò, Aldo Ciccolini, Bruno Giuranna, Heinz Holliger, Wilhelm Kempff, Gyorgy Kurtag, Alberto Lysy , Nikita Magaloff, Andrè Navarra, Charles Rosen, Andras Schiff, Vladimir Spivakov, Uto Ughi, Sandor Vegh, Franco Petracchi, Elissò Virsaladze. And finally the pianist Andrea Rebaudengo with the percussionist Simone Beneventi, the pianist Emanuele Torquati with the cellist Francesco Dillon.
Sermoneta awaits you for unforgettable evenings in the village and in other special places such as the Garden of the Town Hall and the church of San Francesco d'Assisi in Latina, the Infirmary of the Abbey of Fossanova in Priverno, the Cloister of S. Oliva in Cori.
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