Andrea Obiso and Benedetto Lupo with students of the Festival dei Due Mondi Academy

The Festival dei Due Mondi celebrates the meeting of artistic excellence and the new generation with a concert bringing together Benedetto Lupo, Andrea Obiso, and the students of the Festival dei Due Mondi Academy. This event embodies the Academy’s most authentic spirit: transmitting experience, vision, and passion through direct dialogue between masters and young talents on stage.

Benedetto Lupo, a leading figure in the international piano scene, is renowned for the elegance of his touch, analytical depth, and refined sound, qualities that have led him to perform with major orchestras and in the most prestigious halls across Europe and the United States. Alongside his solo career, he maintains an intense activity in chamber music and teaching, as head of the advanced piano course at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.

Andrea Obiso is concertmaster of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and an interpreter admired for his technical brilliance and musical sensitivity, as evidenced by his silver medal at the ARD Competition in Munich, gold at the Prix Ravel, and his distinguished studies at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where he also studied conducting and composition before embarking on a successful orchestral and solo career.

The collaboration between Lupo and Obiso and the students is not merely a side-by-side experience, but a genuine sharing of music-making, where experience intertwines with the enthusiasm and energy of young performers.

The program reflects this richness of perspectives and combines various chamber ensembles, alternating teachers and students on stage in a journey through the Central European repertoire. It opens with Mahler’s Quartettsatz, the composer’s only chamber work without voice, a youthful piece of great expressivity and dark hues; continues with Dvořák’s lively Slavonic Dances Op. 46 (Nos. 3, 7, 8) for piano four hands, exemplifying the rhythmic vitality and folk color that permeate his symphonic and chamber works; and then moves to Martinů’s Trio No. 1, where Czech musical heritage meets Stravinskian neoclassicism with highly original results. The program culminates in Schumann’s celebrated Piano Quintet, a Romantic masterpiece in which chamber dialogue, passionate momentum, masterful writing, and brilliant virtuosity merge into a synthesis that has ensured its success since its premiere in Leipzig, with his wife Clara at the piano.