Federico Fellini—Nino Rota

Having chosen three star duos for the three concerts it will be giving this year in the context of the Athens Festival, the Athens State Orchestra dedicates the evening of July 5 to two legends of, respectively, film and film music: Federico Fellini and Nino Rota.

Their relationship, which might best be described as an ‘affinity’, would remain a fixture in three quarters of Fellini’s films—which is to say the duo collaborated on 18 cinematic and musical masterpieces including La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, La dolce vita, 8 1/2, Satyricon and Amarcord. That is what Hadzidakis meant when he wrote that Rota’s music and Fellini's cinema had been inseparable from the very start and that together “they had created one of the most courageous and magical moments in this world we live in”.

It is this sense of a world shared that the Athens State Orchestra seeks to convey in this concert in which, under the baton of Europe’s leading conductor of film music, Frank Strobel, it will perform Rota’s best-loved melodies accompanied on screen by the corresponding scenes from Fellini’s films.