Music Inside Rimini: Things are Increasingly International

Music Inside Rimini is increasingly asserting itself as an expo with an international profile. This can be seen by the presence of important professionals of the sector who took part in this edition and gave a great contribution to it. Different countries of origin, cultures, and passions that, brought together, created an extremely fascinating environment at the expo.

"Passion is the real driving power of success," states US guitarist Stef Burns (Y&T, Huey Lewis & The News and more), famous in Italy for having played for a long time with Vasco Rossi, who performed his own repertoire on the Music Square stage. He stressed the concept of aggregation and meeting as the distinctive element of MIR, able bring everybody together round a single interest, which is music. No less impressive was the presence of Xantoné Blacq, born in Nigeria but of British adoption, who, as a self-taught musician, became one of the important members of the Amy Winehouse band, precisely during the period of the singer's first hit: Black to Black.

Alongside the world of sound, there was also that of lighting, with the participation of one of the most important English lighting designers and programmers, Rob Halliday, who has worked on London productions such as Shakespeare in Love, Billy Elliot in Holland, and in New York on Evita, Red, and Mary Poppins, but also legendary show like Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, and many more. And the astonishing latest show on which he worked, "Giudizio Universale. Michelangelo and the Secrets of the Sistine Chapel" a multimedia multisensory show featuring the used of very high definition images, extremely high impact lighting and with a highly suggestive musical atmosphere. Another participant who didn't pass unobserved was Berlin lighting designer Bjoern Hermann, well-known for having developed an exceptionally high profile event in Frankfurt on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of German reunification. In his artistic collective in the German capital, Hermann is a great experimenter of new formats combining sound, video, lighting, and special effects.