The Roads of Friendship: Ravenna-Sarajevo

After exactly 13 years, Ravenna Festival’s Roads of Friendship returned to the same place, across the Adriatic sea, that was the destination of the first, dramatic journey: Sarajevo. What more noble and meaningful occasion than this return to the Bosnian capital to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the festival, the theme of which, significantly, was Prayer: prayer in commemoration of the victims of a terrible war that set brother against brother, prayer for a brighter future, built on peace, dialogue and mutual understanding, despite any differences (following in the wake of centuries of admirable, peaceful coexistence). On Monday 13 July, at the Zetra Centre in Sarajevo, Riccardo Muti led the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Orchestra and Choir in a programme that closed – like the previous concert back in 1997 – with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony N° 3, the “Eroica”. At the 1997 concert, the few remaining members of the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra came together; this time the concert involved a broad polyphony of voices from the different geographical regions, ethnic and religious groups that distinguish this European land and its capital. And so from Mostar (in the Croat Canton of Herzegovina-Neretva), Lukavica and Srebrenica (now in the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina), and Tuzla, instrumentalists and especially choirs, some of children, joined together to bring a message of hope, forming an ideal bridge between historic memory and the future.