Artistic Director of Associazione Culturale MusicaVenezia, Roberta Reeder continues her career in arts management which began as a student when she was Director of the Festival of the Arts at the University of Chicago and then continued as Artistic Director of ETC, a cultural association in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she organized Festivals of the Arts: concerts, art exhibitions, and cultural symposiums, often in collaboration with Harvard University, where she taught and did research at the Harvard Russian Research Center and Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. For many years on New Year’s Eve she organized performances of Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss, Jr. in Cambridge and Boston. She received an NEA grant from the U.S. government for a Ukrainian Festival of the Arts, which included concerts, art exhibitions, workshops on folk music, and a film series. In association with an exhibition of Russian art at Harvard she organized a Soviet film Festival. She wrote and produced two plays in Boston, the monodrama Alma Mahler: Muse and Musician and Cabaret Russe, about the poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam during the period of the Russian Revolution, with songs by the famous Russian cabaret artist Alexander Vertinsky. In Germany she had a DAAD (German Government Exchange Grant) for the Theater Institute at Justus-Liebig University to adapt Anna Akhmatova’s narrative poem Poem Without a Hero as a dance drama. While working at the Franz Liszt Conservatory in Weimar, she organized a Festival “Music at the time of Alexander Pushkin”.
She now lives in Venice, where she taught for several years at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory. In Venice she founded the Associazione Culturale MusicaVenezia which organized a monthly baroque music series at the museum Casa di Carlo Goldoni and later presented a similar series at the Santa Lucia Church. MusicaVenezia has established a tradition of concerts for holidays such as concerts of sacred music for Christmas and Easter, as well as for Venetian events such as Redentore, the Historical Regatta, and the Venetian carnival. Every January there is a special concert for the Italian annual event “Commemoration of the Holocaust”. Another annual event is “Women in Music” for March: Women’s Month, which has included concerts of works by women composers such as Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler, Barbara Strozzi, and Hildegard von Bingen. She has also written and produced her own works, A Futurist Evening in Venice, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Italian Futurism and a music drama, Cabaret Theresienstadt, in Commemoration of the Holocaust. She commissioned a transcription of the manuscript of the oratorio San Nicolo di Bari by G. Bononcini and organizes an annual concert with this work on 6 December, St. Nicholas’ Day. In Palazzo Labia in the hall with frescoes of Cleopatra by Tiepolo she presented a staged production of “Marc’Antonio e Cleopara” by J.A. Hasse. For the 100th anniversary of the famous Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio she organized a special film showing of “La nava” (The Boat) based on his tragedy and a concert with his poetry set to music by Tosti and Malipiero. With Alliance Franςaise di Venise she presented “La Belle Epoque” with French art, music and poetry of the period. She organized two productions with shadow puppet theatre–“Don Giovanni” with singers and piano, and for Giorno della Memoria (Commemoration of the Holocaust), the opera “Brundibar” by Hans Krasa, who died in a concentration camp, with a children’s chorus and an instrumental ensemble. With Archivio Carlo Montanaro, she now presents cine-concerts for Venice Carnival, March: Woman’s Month and Art Night.
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