CaronAntica 2026 - Early Music Festival

The new season opens with a true Baroque celebration: April’s concert will be dedicated to the splendor of the Dresden Orchestra and to concertos for multiple instruments, reflecting the exceptional artistic level achieved by the Dresden Court Orchestra in the 18th century.

The Festival will continue in May with the singers of the ensemble La Fonte Musica (awarded the “Diapason d’Or” several times), who will take us on a journey to the origins of polyphony, with a program entirely devoted to the greatest representative of the Notre-Dame School: Pérotin. An unmissable event highlighting extraordinary 13th-century music that still amazes us today with its striking modernity.

Next comes the CaronAntica Summer Festival, entirely dedicated to musical dialogue in its many forms. As every year, the resident ensemble will animate the festival, exploring instrumental dialogues in 18th-century double concertos.

This will be followed by the traditional musical brunch at Hotel Villa Carona — a perfect dialogue between music and culinary delights.

In the magnificent, recently restored Sanctuary of the Madonna d’Ongero, the renowned lutenist Bor Zuljan will engage in dialogue with baritone Romain Bockler in a program devoted to the delicate Airs de cour of early French Baroque.

The closing concert of the Summer Festival, under the stars of Piazza Montaa, will bring together the resident ensemble and the splendid voices of soprano Hélène Walter and bass Alessandro Ravasio for a grand finale dedicated to vocal dialogue in Georg Friedrich Handel’s magnificent cantata Apollo e Dafne.

This year, CaronAntica will also present an additional event — a spin-off following the Summer Festival: an exceptional concert in collaboration with LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, exploring the theme of musical dialogue in a broader sense. The ensemble Concerto Scirocco, the Clairière Choir of the Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana conducted by Brunella Clerici, and the ClareChoir of Clare College, Cambridge will take part. They will perform Alessandro Striggio’s monumental 40-part Mass and Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium, two masterpieces built on the dialogue between opposing choirs, bridging the late Renaissance and the early Baroque.

This concert will take place at the LAC in Lugano, thus bringing CaronAntica into the heart of the city.

Free