Barbara Hannigan with the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia for the Final Concert of the Festival dei Due Mondi

The sixty-seventh edition of Festival dei Due Mondi closes tomorrow, July 14, with its most anticipated event, the final concert in Piazza Duomoat at 7:30 p.m. Barbara Hannigan reunites with the musicians of theOrchestra dell'AccademiaNazionale di Santa Cecilia-which she conducted in 2022 for Francis Poulenc's La VoixHumaine-returning to Spoleto in the dual role disoprano and conductor. Hannigan draws on her collection of out-of-the-ordinary feminine roles and performs the Girl Crazy Suite,in the adaptation she co-curated with composer Bill Elliott from George Gershwin's musicalomonym, alongside to masterpieces from different eras in the first part of the concert, with Albert Roussel's Le festin de l'araignée, the Sinfonian. 104 London by Haydn and the Valse triste Op. 44 No. 1 by Sibelius.

Whether it's shouts, pops, whispers, clusters of consonants or soft melodies,Barbara Hannigan's pyrotechnic voice is always up to the task. Hervirtuosity has made her the muse of the greatest contemporary composers, fromJohn Zorn to Salvatore Sciarrino. A soprano and conductor, she creates one-of-a-kind performances, dissolving the boundary between the baton from which a musical phrase springs and the voice that intones it. Festival audiences remember her onstage at Piazza Duomo, when in 2022 she dressed ipanni of Elle, the hallucinated protagonist of FrancisPoulenc's La Voix Humaine, with a large screen that also made her gestures visible to the audience. Continuing the collection of out-of-the-ordinary female roles,which she favors, Hannigan brings to the Festival the Girl Crazy Suite,in the adaptation she co-curated with composer Bill Elliott from George Gershwin's musicalomonym. First staged in 1930, it is among the greatest masterpieces of the American tradition, decreed the rise of Ginger Rogersin the pantheon of actresses, while in the film version the castincluded Mickey Roneey and Judy Garland. The Suite was part of Hannigan's world tour with the Ludwig Orchestra in 2017, and the first albumrecorded the following year for Alpha Records from singer and conductor, which won a Grammy Award. In the first part of the concert, the juxtaposition of symphonic pieces from different eras is equally sharp. It begins with Le festin del'araignée, a suite from Albert Roussel's ballet about a parade of insects trapped in a spider's web among the plants of a sunken garden. The same light filters through the pages of Haydn's "London" Symphony,among the composer's most sparkling inventions. Among JeanSibelius's most beloved works, with its melancholy and crystalline atmospheres the Valse tristestato Finland as On the Beautiful Blue Danube stands to Austria.

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