Ravello Concert & Festival

A paradise up high on the Amalfi Coast whose thousand facets of beauty are composed of medieval ruins, breathtaking views and lush gardens overlooking the sea. Lord Byron would have loved it. Wagner was fascinated by its gardens and landscapes. Gore Vidal called it home for several months a year. Ravello is an absolutely romantic place, a pocket paradise perched on a rocky ridge, more than a thousand meters above sea level. Villa Rufolo and Villa Cimbrone with their enchanting gardens and historical heritage, the Cathedral with its famous medieval mosaics and ambos and the countless small chapels scattered along the streets and steps are all part of Ravello: offering its romantic and otherworldly atmosphere to tourists from all over the world. 
In this evocative atmosphere the series of concerts of the Ravello Concert Society (RCS) is a traditional and consolidated date, which over the years has delighted thousands of visitors with a wide range of performances by soloists and chamber music groups.

The “Princess Concerts”, organized to commemorate the visit of Princess Maria José of Savoy, who arrived in Ravello in 1933, was the first music festival promoted by the Ravello Concert Society. Since then, RCS has produced over two thousand concerts, with over 800 musicians. In this way it has developed a growing local, national and international reputation as a promoter of the arts, offering events with a promise of great music in casual but stimulating environments, with high-level musicians, an ear for contemporary music and refreshing concert formats. RCS 34th season of concerts kicks off on Monday 1st of April with the Hadimova String Quartet performing the 13th stage of their multi-year project of the complete series of quartets by Haydn. The same ensemble will be continuing the series of Schubert’s in 2019 (28th of October). The scope and diversity of the RCS repertoire are increasing every year: the 2019 programme features a total of 85 chamber music concerts. The wide-ranging programme will be rounded off by several well-established event series.

The Ravello Festival, in its current configuration, derives from a series of previous initiatives that make it one of the oldest Italian festivals. Girolamo Bottiglieri and Paolo Caruso are to be thanked for the conception of the cultural event which, more than any other, would have contributed to building the identity of Ravello as a “City of Music”. The association of Wagner’s name with Villa Rufolo, made splendid and welcoming by the Scottish philanthropist Francis Neville Reid, was too tempting not to suggest the idea of performing concerts in a site blessed personally by the great composer. For this reason, in the Thirties, the orchestra of the San Carlo Theatre performed here more than once, with programs related to Wagner. One of these concerts were also attended by the Princes of Piedmont, and Ravello returned the honor of their visit by dedicating to the Princess the viewpoint that currently separates the Sasso hotel from the Palumbo hotel.

The idea remained in the air, so that Paolo Caruso replayed it, twenty years later, adding to it the daring logistical solution of a stage suspended in space. The initiative took shape thanks to the commitment of the Provincial Tourist Board, then directed by Girolamo Bottiglieri and, in the summer of 1953, on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the death of Wagner, the “Wagner concerts in the garden of Klingsor” ( as the cover of the hall program read the text) they started with two evenings entrusted to the San Carlo Theater Orchestra conducted by Hermann Scherchen and William Steinberg. For years Wagner has remained a tutelary deity of the festival and still a special attention is devoted devoutly to his music.