The Orchestra Notturna Clandestina. ONC archive.
The Romaeuropa Festival, now in its forty-first edition, runs across Rome from September to November with its usual catalogue of theatre, dance and international avant-garde music. Inside that catalogue, one date concerns the readers of this magazine directly, and we won’t pretend to be discovering it only now: Sunday 15 November, 8 pm, Auditorium Parco della Musica, Sala Santa Cecilia, The Classical Rave Party, conceived by Enrico Melozzi with the Orchestra Notturna Clandestina, in collaboration with the Accademia di Santa Cecilia.
The announced bill gives the measure of the project: on stage, alongside the orchestra, Niccolò Fabi, Giovanni Sollima, the Italian Army Band, Elsa Lila, Anastasio and Fasma, with a line-up openly still being updated; and Alessandro Baricco, the author of the Breve storia eretica that we read in instalments this month, down to dismantling its Big Bang. The format comes from a particular season of Roman nightlife, 2018 and 2019, when the orchestra played twelve hours straight in squatted buildings and all the wrong places, as we reported in August: classical music treated as a collective physical experience, not a ceremony, in direct descent from Beethoven’s academy of 1808.
The venue is the news inside the news, and anyone who has followed our pages on the Roman calendar will catch it at once: that same week, in that same hall, Kirill Petrenko conducts, and a few days later Pappano is back. The most liturgical symphonic temple in Italy hosts, between one rite and the next, the evening that turns ritual into dancing flesh: no other European auditorium, this autumn, holds the two extremes together within hours of each other. It is exactly the thesis this magazine has been defending for months, an audience that does not have to understand but only be swept away, turned into a live experiment on 2,800 seats.
A declaration of interest, as required: the originator of the evening is the founder of this publication, and readers should bear that in mind as we would bear in mind a Ricordi house paper reviewing Verdi. That said, tickets run from €30 to €40 on Vivaticket, there is a pass covering several festival performances, and our practical advice is not to arrive tired: the evening is built to last. The rest, including the final line-up, we will report here as it comes together. Sources: official Romaeuropa Festival 2026 programme.