Baudelaire: Fleurs du Mal

A cultural event of ultimate value and unique nature took place for the first time in Bologna and Italy thanks to five encounters with Baudelaire. “Baudelaire: Fleurs du Mal”, proposed by the Unipol Group and Music Together, included the complete reading of a collection of poetry that is essential to the modern era, associating it with classical music greats such as Wagner, Liszt, Chopin and Beethoven, whom Baudelaire himself admired or knew, as well as with a later composer such as Skrjabin who is connected to Baudelaire by an ideal "correspondence".

The cycle was thus concentrated on a dual and harmonious dimension: poetry and music. The poetic dimension was exalted justly by the choice of proposing for the first time the complete reading of the first edition (1857) of Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire, recently translated by Nicola Muschitiello. A poet with «a real voice» and «unique personality, the last of the bohemians on the Italian literary panorama», Nicola Muschitiello was a perfect choice as reader of Baudelaire's poems.

Protagonist of the musical execution was Alexander Romanovsky, the Ukrainian pianist who studied at the international Academy "Meetings with the Maestro" of Imola, who following his victory, at barely 17 years of age of the prestigious International Competition "Ferruccio Busoni" in 2001, embarked upon a very intense career and today is a musician universally appreciated for his technical solidity, together with an extremely expressive maturity.