Awarded Prestigious Grant for Second Tour of Poland

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FOR RELEASE JANUARY 25, 2016

Contact: Carmela Altamura
Tel: 201-863-8724 (winter)

Altamura Center for the Arts

4000 Bergenline Avenue
Union City, NJ 07087 – or –
404 Winter Clove Road
Round Top, NY 12473
t: 201-863-8724 (winter) e: icpainc@optonline.net

Altamura Center Awarded Prestigious Grant for Summer Music Festival and Second Tour of Poland

Union City, New Jersey. January 18 – For the fourth successive year, the Altamura Center for the Arts and its home company, Inter-Cities Performing Arts, Inc., will receive a grant from the Agnes Varis Charitable Trust. The trust was established to support Varis’ passion for women’s rights, the underprivileged, and the arts, especially opera. Funds will benefit the Altamura Center’s Summer Music Festival as well as help to support winners and finalists of Inter-Cities’ Altamura/Caruso International Voice Competition on a forthcoming tour of Poland.

The 2016 Altamura Center Summer Music Festival will present three highly-appealing programs. On the roster will be “Heroes and Heroines” — Verdi’s famous operatic arias; “Mozart’s Women” — arias from operas the composer dedicated to his beloved wife, Costanza; and ”Latin Embrace: Tango, Anyone?” — a solo program of Latin American music performed by Argentine pianist, Rosa Antonelli. John Sigerson will conduct the Inter-Cities Chamber Ensemble. Detailed information about the Summer Festival will be available in the spring.

With help from an earlier Varis Trust grant, Inter-Cities presented young musicians and the first-prize winner of the Altamura Competition in programs that took place in Rome and Naples in the fall of 2015. The second part of that tour included highly successful concerts in Katowice, Bytom, and Krakow, Poland.

Carmela Altamura, founder of Inter-Cities, said, “Polish audiences were simply thrilled at the level of talent we brought to their homeland, and we with theirs. Leaders there have invited us back for a repeat performance, and two cities have been added to the 2016 tour: Chorzow and Zabrze, Poland.”

The Altamura Center and Inter-Cities’ mission is to promote and present the arts in the spirit of bringing together all cultures and nations. Mrs. Altamura said, “It seems nearly-pre-ordained that we would receive a grant from the Agnes Varis Trust because her artistic vision and ours are so closely aligned.” She went on to say, “There is a plaque in New York’s Central Park, dedicated to Varis, reflecting our twin philosophies. On it is a quote from Pericles: “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone, but what is woven into the lives of others. “

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