Festival Udine Castello 2025: Angeli e Segrete
In its 12th edition, the Festival Udine Castello celebrates the theme ‘Angels and Secrets’, with the subtitle ‘Relationships’, explored and reflected through a variety of programmes.
An interweaving of places and sounds, marked by a delicate common thread, will take centre stage during Festival Udine Castello from 13 to 25 May. With 11 events - including concerts, excursions, and conferences - the festival will showcase some of the world’s leading artists, such as Canadian Connie Shih (piano), Italian Giovanni Gnocchi (cello), South African Devroop Karendra (saxophone), American Amadi Azikiwe (violin), and Koreans Donghyun Kim (oboe) and Suyoung Lee (piano). Emerging local talents such as Matteo Pettena, winner of the Euroregion Prize, and FVG composers Carlo Corazza and Giorgio Tortora, will also be performing. Renowned musicologist Danilo Prefumo will open the festival with a speech on the theme of relationships in music.
The venues are linked by the binomial of the angel indicators and the prisons housed within Udine Castle and other historic sites. Guided tours will lead visitors through the dungeons and underground spaces that distinguish these locations. The events then radiate outwards to Cividale del Friuli, with its ancient Celtic hypogeum and medieval cell; Palmanova, with its underground tunnels and visits to the bastions; the Castle of Artegna, whose parish church stands out with its indicator angel; the mother church of Moruzzo; and finally the Basilica of Sant’Eufemia in Grado, bearer of an angel wind marker.
The theme of ‘relationships’ brings together under a single word the metaphors represented in the different concerts: didactic, amorous, and epistolary relationships unfold through the events at the Tower of Santa Maria in Udine. These include ‘duel’ appointments between teacher and student, programmes that explore the figures of Clara Schumann and Brahms, an event dedicated to the correspondence between Sciascia and Zlobec, and the relationship of opposites between cultures and repertoires.