Daniele Gatti will conduct an anniversary performance of Verdi’s Requiem, eighty years after the destruction of the city where he is now chief conductor.
Press release:
The raid on 13 and 14 February 1945 that razed to the ground the greater part of the city of Dresden was one of the most destructive bombings of World War II. 1,500 tons of explosive bombs and 1,200 tons of firebombs were dropped by more than 800 British airplanes, later joined by America’s aircrafts B-17, spreading death and terror with the precise intent to completely destroy the city. The greater part of the historic center was razed to the ground by an enormous fire that raised the air temperature by hundreds of degrees Celsius. American writer Kurt Vonnegut spoke about it in his celebrated book Slaughterhouse-Five.
Eighty years after those dramatic events, the Staatskapelle of Saxony’s capital – one of the oldest and most prestigious orchestras worldwide, created in 1548 – and its Principal Conductor Daniele Gatti, will be remembering them with a concert symbolically featuring Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem. The concert is scheduled for Wednesday 12 February and Thursday 13 February at 7pm at the Semperoper. The theater, itself hit by the bombing, will also be hosting an exhibition commemorating both the theater’s bombing and its reconstruction, completed forty years ago in 1985.
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