(by Claudia Fascia) Canadian singer and songwriter Rufus Wainwright, who has just released "Take All My Loves - Shakespeare sonnets", is inaugurating the fourth edition of the Rumors Festival in Verona on Thursday.
The artist said his only European concert will include a "mixture" of his most recent and earlier work.
A guest star at the Sanremo Music Festival in 2014, Wainwright said he will be performing music ranging from "Intimate Judy (dedicated to Judy Garland) to Shakespeare's sonnets, to something from my oldest works like Out of the Game and Songs for Lulu".
Wainwright will be performing Shakespeare for the first time in Verona, the city of Romeo and Juliet, and he is a little anxious: "I am curious to see how it will go and whether I will feel a special emotion", he said.
Meanwhile the city is ready to give the artist an official award for his work on the 400th anniversary of the British poet and playwright's death, to celebrate his choice to work on the sonnets.
"I believe that the wonderful thing about Shakespeare is that the love he writes about, between his characters, is devoid of any type of sexuality", he said.
"In other words, although Romeo and Juliet are a man and a woman, the way in which he writes and describes everything is so universal and without boundaries that he could well be talking about the story of two men, Romeo and Romeo", the artist said. He added that there are relationships between men described by Shakespeare that are "full of passion and deeply sexual".
"I believe that, in general, when you get to the heart of a character, the gender doesn't matter because love, as described by him, is devoid of sexual identity".
The songwriter also said that, in the sonnets, Shakespeare "plays with sexual identity" - although in the end nothing matters other than love, regardless of a person's identity and gender.
"Rumors Festival illazioni vocali" will include a performance by British singer Jack Savoretti on June 17 and Italian actor and singer Neri Marcorè on June 18.
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