Green Corfu is an official partner of the Dionysia Opera Festival, to be held in Corfu between 8 and 13 September 2017. The festival is organised by the Orlin Anastassov Foundation and will consist of four performances:
- Friday 8 September: Norma
- Sunday 10 September: Carmen
- Monday 11 September: Aida
- Wednesday 13 September: Barbiere di Siviglia
Starring are some of the top opera singers worldwide, like Dimitra Theodosiou, Boris Lukov, Joana Zhelezcheva, Sanja Anastasia and more.
For more info and booking your ticket please visit the official Dionysia Opera Festival website!
One might wonder, what does Green Corfu have to do with opera? Well, many things….!
First of all, Green Corfu is all about alternative holidays, and opera tourism is a very interesting form of alternative tourism. There are tour operators all around the world who specialise in opera holidays. A search on “opera holidays” on Google yields 34,000,000 results! This festival can bring hundreds of opera lovers to the island in a period outside the high season of July and August. And these are not just any type of visitors, opera fans have a much higher than average income and can give a boost to the local economy.
Green Corfu has also done a lot of work in the direction of marketing and branding Corfu as a tourist destination. We have organised the Corfu Symposium on Managing and Marketing Places for 4 consecutive years, and one of the main ideas that came out of this academic symposium was using our cultural heritage to brand Corfu. On a longer-term perspective, we can imagine Corfu creating a brand name as “The Music Island”.
As we all know, Corfu has a very long musical tradition. The old lyrical theater of Corfu was a replica of the Scala of Milan, and many operas premiered on Corfu. If the audience liked the performance and gave the artists a big round of applause, the opera would get the honorable reference “Applaudito in Corfu”, that’s how musically educated the audience of Corfu was considered to be! There are also many bands on the island playing traditional music.
But also today, music is very much alive on Corfu. There are 17 brass bands on the islands, with the biggest ones marching with 200 people each at the Easter processions. There is a music department at the Ionian university, producing many excellent musicians. Many famous musicians of all genres from abroad visit Corfu and give unique concerts throughout the island.
This year the Corfu Jazz World festival was organised for the first time with great success. The Sound and Silence festival in Arillas is getting some of the top spiritual musicians of the world together for a unique gathering for the fourth time in 2017, with names like Estas Tonne, Mirabai Ceiba, Jai Jagdeesh and Peia.
As William Congreve states, “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast. To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak”. So, next to making good business sense, supporting music events and endeavours might actually help us become better human beings!
