The Italian pianist and conductor Epifanio Comis studied with eminent musicians such as Agatella Catania, Lazar Berman and Piero Rattalino. Today he is known for organising numerous masterclasses at important institutions in New York, Warsaw, Mons, Paris, Moscow and Bucharest, and also teaches at the Ljubljana Festival Masterclasses. Furthermore, he is the director of and a professor at the Vincenzo Bellini State Conservatory for Music in Catania, where in 2020 he founded the very active Orchestra Sinfonica del Conservatorio Vincenzo Bellini di Catania (Catania Vincenzo Bellini Conservatory Symphonic Orchestra), which includes teachers and students from the Associazione Musicale Etnea. The orchestra has prepared a varied programme for its Ljubljana concert, beginning with the opening Sinfonia from Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Norma  and continuing with a selection of his most popular arias. The latter will be sung by the soprano Serena Sáenz, winner of the second prize at the Operalia international opera competition in 2022. The first half of the programme will end with a work by Saverio Mercadante, one of the leading Italian opera composers of his day, whose style influenced Giuseppe Verdi. After the interval the concert will continue with a performance of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F minor,  a work that moves between classical structure and the symphonic poem form pioneered by Franz Liszt.