(Credit: © Todd Rosenberg Photography 2012)

The Ravenna Festival is set to bring live concerts back to Italy for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The festival, which takes places in Ravenna, Italy, will offer a re-imagined program, featuring up to 40 events between June 21 and July 30 starting with an open air concert led by Riccardo Muti in the city’s 15th century fortress, Rocca Brancaleone.

Muti will conduct over 60 members of the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra and soloist Rosa Feola in a program that will include the Rêverie by Alexandr Nikolaevič Skrjabin, Mozart’s Exultate, jubilate motet K. 165 and Et incarnatus est from the Mass in C minor K. 427. Muti will also conduct Mozart’s “Symphony no. 41 in C major K. 551.

The festival announced that all social distancing regulations will be followed for the safety of the artists, staff, and 250 members of the audience.

The rest of the 2020 program will be announced in the coming weeks.

The festival also announced that the 2021 edition has already been planned and it will be a celebration of Ravenna’s most famous honorary citizen – Dante Alighieri, who died in Ravenna in 1321.