Monteverdi Festival

The Monteverdi Festival is the international festival named after the composer Claudio Monteverdi, the father of Italian opera, in the city where he was born, Cremona. For more than forty years, the Monteverdi Festival has set itself the goal of disseminating the work of Claudio Monteverdi and, more generally, the musical repertoire (sacred and secular) of the 16th and 17th centuries in Italy and throughout the world. It does so by recovering the ancient musical heritage, re-proposing it through correct performance and interpretation practices, and supporting it with adequate musicological and organological research.

Claudio Monteverdi is universally known as one of the greatest innovators in the history of music and inventor of the most famous Italian genre in the world: opera. The Monteverdi Festival, promoted by the Ponchielli Theatre Foundation in Cremona, under the artistic direction of Andrea Cigni, involves the best internationally recognised artists and emerging young talents in its productions.

Now in its 42nd edition in 2025, the festival between the 13th and 29th of June presents over 30 appointments with opera productions, concerts, meetings, training residencies and crossover experiences between several performance languages. Two new Monteverdian opera productions: L'Orfeo, the first masterpiece in the history of melodrama, with the musical direction of Francesco Corti, the direction of Olivier Fredj and in the cast the winners of the CMC - Cavalli Monteverdi Competition international baroque singing competition, and the Polittico Monteverdiano, a project celebrating the 400th anniversary of the first performance of Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, directed by Roberto Catalano, with Antonio Greco, harpsichord director, who is also the Festival's head conductor.