Stresa Festival for the Abbado Forest

Dear Audience,

I am delighted and honored by your presence at Stresa Festival 2024!

Stresa Festival will be dedicated to the memory of Claudio Abbado ten years after his passing. Claudio, a true visionary, a rare Maestro and always on the run toward the future, laid out many paths and as many he left open for the music to come. Abbado always reconciled the figure of an artist with that of a socially engaged man, and one of the roads he indicated, and that Stresa Festival wants to take, enters the world of nature, of respect for the planet, of the conviction that music too can and must play its part.

Twenty-five years ago, ahead of his time, Abbado asked for a return to conducting at La Scala that 90000 trees be planted in Milan. Now this is a very topical issue; in 2019, a study published in Science showed that “planting a trillion trees” would, at least in part, solve the climate crisis, and given that in the last two centuries man has cut down two trillion trees, replanting a billion should not be so complicated.

Stresa Festival has chosen to follow Abbado’s vision and is committed to growing a new forest dedicated to the Maestro within Campo dei Fiori Park, on the other side of Lake Maggiore. We have already adopted the first trees and together we can make the forest very big. You also participate by adopting a tree with WOWnature to improve the nature around us.

I would like to let you know about this initiative because I would like the whole Festival – organization, audience, artists, all together – using the amplifying power of music, to give back voice and meaning to Claudio Abbado’s message.

I look forward to meeting each of you in Stresa!

Mario Brunello