WASHINGTON, Sept. 22, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 'Opera Italiana is in the Air', the project of Maestro Alvise Casellati, returned to Washington on Thursday for a new event at the Lincoln Memorial. The free concert, themed 'Peace on Earth: The Art of Nature', once again aimed to make the beauty of Opera accessible and enjoyable by all. Headlining the event, tenor Michael Fabiano, together with bass George Andguladze and soprano Lydia Grindatto. “Culture and music have the power to bring people together. On this highly symbolic day, this event contains important ingredients for peace and we are excited to bring them to the nation's capital,” says Casellati, referring to the International Day of Peace which is celebrated on September 21. The concert was opened by the performance of Verdi's Hymn of the Nations, written for the International Exhibition in London in 1862. The program also included the performance of 'All Around Earth', a composition by eleven-year-old Isaac Thomas, a young talent from the Juilliard School in New York. "We bring together very talented young people together with very established professionals, in this case the orchestra is almost entirely made up of members of the Washington National Opera," says Casellati. At the concert The Italian ambassador to Washington, Mariangela Zappia, was also present. "It is a symbolic concert," said Zappia, recalling that in recent days peace in Ukraine has been discussed during the UN General Assembly, and that the concert was held on the same day that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was visiting Washington. “We don't want to hear the sound of war, but the sound of music,” Zappia said. Alvise Casellati is the founder and musical director of Opera Italiana is in the Air, an organization he created in 2017, six years after abandoning his career as a lawyer to follow his dream: connecting new and diverse audiences to bring Italian Opera back to the context to which it belongs: pop music. Today he lives his "dream" of making the beauty of Italian opera known and accessible to all. Since his debut in Italy at the Venice Opera House in 2011, he has worked with hundreds of artists, dozens of theatres, orchestras and music festivals around the world. “Opera has been popular for 425 years, but in recent years it has been perceived as music for the elites. It is not. It is more relevant than ever to today's audiences and we want to help a broader, younger audience understand it and fall in love with it, as many others have done in the past," says Casellati. The concert program saw the performance of compositions by Verdi, Mozart, Beethoven, Puccini and Rossini.

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