ANDREA BOCELLI CONCERT AT TEATRO DEL SILENZIO (LAIATICO, PISA): THURSDAY, 28 JULY 2022, 20.30.
The seventeenth concert season at the Teatro del Silenzio (Theatre of Silence) will transform the peaceful rural setting of Pisa’s Lajatico, home of Andrea Bocelli, into the Great Music Capital of the World. This year it will take place on Thursday 28 July, a special evening in the starlit Tuscan sky, on which theatre guests will embark on an unforgettable journey together with Andrea Bocelli and his friends, the acclaimed international music stars. Against the wonderful scenery of his homeland, Maestro Bocelli performs arias by great composers and his most popular songs, accompanied by splendid choreography and phantasmagoric stage sets. Despite the height of the pandemic, in the summer of 2020 the maestro, unwilling to interrupt the tradition of annual concerts, staged a grandiose show in Laatico where the audience was replaced by flags of all the countries of the world. A year later, in July 2021, Andrea Bocelli gave a magnificent concert dedicated to the mystery of beauty in art and life. The 2022 concert should mark the world’s return to full life after a long pandemic.
On 28 July 2022, a unique performance will take place on the outskirts of Lajatico that will immerse audiences in musical and visual ecstasy. “During this summer’s concert we will be part of a grand celebration which will be a new challenge for me at the peak of my career. I will try to live up to your expectations, and if I can, exceed them. After the uncertainty of a two-year global pandemic, culture and the arts must fully resume their pivotal role in humanity. I very much want – and will do my best to ensure – that the next concert at the Theatre of Silence will be a sumptuous, sunny, memorable metaphor for a world re-launch, a powerful expression that art (and music as the ‘voice of art’) always wins,” declared maestro Bocelli himself.
Tenor Andrea Bocelli is by far Italy’s premier opera and pop singer these days. His hometown, the tiny town of Lajatico, on the road from Pisa to the ancient Etruscan city of Volterra, becomes one of the music capitals of the world every year thanks to Bocelli. Bocelli’s musical talent manifested itself at an early age, with the young Andrea being taught to play three different instruments at once. Then he didn’t want to study music himself, and the least of all he disliked singing – because when guests came to the house instead of playing with his peers he had to please them with singing. Then as a child Andrea suffered a tragedy – at the age of 12 after a head injury he gradually lost his sight. This did not prevent him, however, from finishing school and obtaining a law degree from the prestigious Pisa University. Away from university the young Bocelli devoted himself to his music and vocal training. An international star, Andrea Bocelli has not forgotten his ‘small motherland’, making his native Lajatico one of the major stages in the world music calendar. Every year since 2006 in high summer Andrea Bocelli gives a concert in the “Teatro del Silenzio” (Theatre of Silence), a natural setting on the outskirts of Lajatico. The theatre owes its unusual name to the fact that it is “silent” throughout the year and “comes to life” for one or two evenings during concerts by the great tenor. According to the maestro’s original idea, the ‘theatre’ was created to stage one show a year.
The theatre consists of a ‘grandstand’ and ‘parterre’ set up on hillsides and a circular ‘stage’ with a radius of over ten metres, in the centre of which a new set is mounted each year. The most famous of these, which has become a symbol of the theatre itself, is a monumental sculpture depicting a human face, created by Polish sculptor Igor Mitorai for a production of Manon Lescaut in the first season of 2006, and subsequently donated by the sculptor to the theatre. Demand for Andrea Bocelli’s ‘own theatre’ concerts, despite the relatively high ticket price, is always high, and ticket sales are already open on the website of the concert organisers, CitySound http://citysoundmilano.com/info-and-tickets/.