Italian Best Musical Talents Answer a call from Missionaries

World famous Italian maestro Riccardo Muti, conductor and music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, will be in Kenya on 9 July 2011 with more than two hundred members of the Orchestra Cherubini for a concert at Nairobi’s historic Uhuru Park grounds. Kenyan musicians and singers will also be part of the concert that will certainly be the biggest ever classical music extravaganza in Africa, South of the Sahara.

The event is part of the initiative of the Ravenna Festival dubbed Roads of friendship, born in Sarajevo in 1997. Since then, every year, maestro Muti, the Orchestra Cherubini and the Ravenna Festival have organized a concert in different places of the world to celebrate and to invoke peace and brotherhood through music.

The invite to perform in Nairobi was received by maestro Muti at the end of a concert held in December 2009 at the Teatro Municipale in Piacenza (Italy) to raise funds for Francesca Lipeti, a Piacenza-born medical doctor who has been working in Kenya since 1994, and for Fr Kizito Sesana, a Comboni missionary operating in Africa since 1977.

On that occasion, Riccardo Muti was confronted with a dream: dedicating a concert to dwellers of the Nairobi slums. The purpose: awakening souls through music’s universal and boundless message and actively supporting the development and social promotion of Kibera, one of sub-Saharan Africa’s largest slum settlements, through fundraising for scholarships.

Riccardo Muti’s immediate support of the idea was promptly backed by Ravenna Festival and Piacenza Municipality, with the collaboration of Amani Onlus, a Milan-based NGO co- founded by Fr Kizito and which is actively involved in the care and education of poor children in Kenya, Zambia and Sudan. The project was also endorsed by RAI, the Italian state owned public service broadcaster, who will broadcast the event in Italy and other countries. Also endorsing the project were the Nairobi City Council, as well as the Italian embassy in Kenya. The Kenyan Government, through its Vice- President Kalonzo Musyoka, has also enthusiastically supported the initiative.

The music extravaganza is a unique event that will enhance the reputation of Nairobi as the emerging cultural capital of East Africa.

Catch a Glimpse of Ravenna Festival Previous Performance

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