• Federico Bardazzi Artistic Director
• Carla Zanin Founder and CEO

The Jury is composed by international acclaimed artists as orchestra conductors, opera singers, composers. The Jury of the 2nd edition of Music Festa Florence will be composed by the following members:
• Milan Kolena President of the jury
• Marisol Carballo
• Ester Maria Castriota

Federico Bardazzi specialises in Early and Baroque Music, he is primarily active as a director in operatic repertoire, from its origins to Händel, Gluck, Mozart, Rossini and Puccini.
Having trained as a cellist with Andrè Navarra in Siena and Paris, he studied chamber music with Piero Farulli and the Quartetto Borodin, composition with Carlo Prosperi e Roberto Becheri, Gregorian chant with Nino Albarosa and Johannes Berchmans Göschl, choral conducting with Roberto Gabbiani and Peter Phillips, orchestral conducting at the Accademia Chigiana with Myung-Whun Chung.
He conducts the Ensemble San Felice, a vocal and instrumental group whose repertoire ranges from Medieval to contemporary music, with whom he has performed to great acclaim across the world.

Devoted for many years now to the Bachian repertoire, through the Ensemble he has conducted all of the great Kirchenmusik and all of the instrumental concerts. He has conducted Händel’s Messiah in numerous concerts in Italy and Europe.
He usually offers, as well as a new version of Mozart’s unfinished Requiem, rare pages and masterpieces of seventeenth-century music: Girolamo Frescobaldi, Francesco Maria Stiava, Dietrich Buxtehude, Jeronimo de Carrion, François Couperin, Michel-Richard Delalande, John Dowland In 2005 in particular he presented three oratorios by Giacomo Carissimi at the Queen Elisabeth Hall in London and, also in London, in May 2008 he conducted the music for the first staged performance in modern time of Händel’s Rodrigo, directed by Luciano Alberti, at the Lufthansa festival of baroque music. This production was presented in 2009 at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence, where in 2011 he directed Claudio Monteverdi’s Il Vespro for the Amici della Musica di Firenze, which was recorded as an audio CD by Brilliant Classic.
His research programmes in Medieval music have met with great success across Europe: Nigra sum sed formosa Cantigas de Santa Maria, La Sibilla del reno Hildegard von Bingen, the litergical drama drawn from Florentine codices Quem queritis, Francesco Landini Laudi e Contrafacta nella Firenze del Trecento, Musica per San Zanobi nella Firenze del Trecento. within this frame he is currently curating La musica della Commedia, an important work on the music of Dante Alighieri’s masterpiece, which takes place through concerts, conferences and multimedia productions.
Federico Bardazzi has been the Director of the Maggio Fiorentino Formazione’s courses from 2008 to 2014. In his role as training coordinator he has realised higher specialized training courses and projects funded by the European Social Fund. All his artistic and technical projects at the lyrical Theatre have been developed in collaboration with some of the main Tuscan musical institutions, such as: Teatro Verdi of Pisa, Festival Pucciniano of Torre del Lago, Teatro Metastasio of Prato, with which he is currently collaborating for other projects. This experience leads to the creation of Opera Network, originally funded together with Carla Zanin, whose objective is to assist in the development of lyrical productions, in collaboration between institutions of different natures, with the aim of encouraging and assisting young artists in the early stages of their careers in developing their professional profile and career path. Some of the most successful projects, all conducted by Federico Bardazzi, have been: Purcell’s Fairy Queen (Teatro Goldoni, Florence 2013), Pergolesi’s Flaminio (Teatro Verdi of Pisa 2014). Two forthcoming productions are: Alessandro Scarlatti’s Il trionfo dell’Onore andGazzaniga’s Don Giovanni (Teatro Verdi, Pisa 2015). Moreover, the season 2016/2017 will see Galuppi’s opera in collaboration with Landestheater of Salzburg, under the direction of Carl Philip von Maldeghem.  
Federico Bardazzi is artistic direct of In-canto gregoriano - Incontri Internazionali di Firenze, a project devoted to the philological study and musical interpretation of the early liturgical repertoire, and member of the senior committee of AISCGre (Associazione Internazionale Studi di Canto Gregoriano). He is also President of the del Florence International Choir Festival, which, every year, brings together hundreds of choristers from all around the world, in a kermesse of high human and musical value.
Being aware of the high potential that the East represents for both the Italian University as well as for the Artistic and Musical Higher Education  system, he is the funder and leading member, within the project Turandot, in collaboration with the Università per Stranieri of Perugia, of a project of cultural, linguistic and musical training for Chinese students.
He has been giving courses on Gregorian chant and Medieval monody at the University of Florence and he has been invited all around the world to lead Masterclasses. 2014 has been a particularly fruitful year, whose highlight have been the World Symposium of Choral Music in Seoul and the Israel Choir Conductor Association in Jerusalem.
Recordings by the Ensemble San Felice – whose concerts have been transmitted by Rai, Swiss, German and Polish radio and the BBC, which has devoted one special on his performances – ranges from the Medieval to the operatic repertoire, and sees him not only in his role of conductor, but also of baroque cellist, gamba and fiddle player, for record labels such as Brilliant, Tactus, and Bongiovanni.
Federico Bardazzi is Professor of Chamber Music and Baroque Music at the State Conservatory Puccini of La Spezia.

Carla Zanin has worked for over twenty years in the live performance sector and specifically in classical and choral music and drama. At first she was the organizational manager and then went into marketing and communications. At present she is the President of Opera Network Florence, an institution skilled in opera productions and in the training of young talents and professionals in all the art performances. Thanks to her long activity in marketing culture by creating innovative and responsible methods for supporting the organisation of live performances, without the excessive use of public money, she conceived and developed the Opera Network Project, a complex network system over which operas can be produced with the cooperation of numerous partners who are directly involved; at the moment the partners are some of the most important performing Arts Academies and Theatres such as Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, Teatro Verdi di Pisa, Fondazione Festival Pucciniano, Teatro Metastasio di Prato, Scuola di Musica di Fiesole, Università per Stranieri di Perugia, Conservatorio Marenzio Brescia, Teatro Nazionale della Toscana; So many opera productions were staged with this system, the first one was in September 2013, Henry Purcell's "The Fairy Queen".

She is the General Manager of the Ensemble San Felice, with whom she takes part in the research and programming of musical projects in Italy and abroad. Particularly she manages teaching/training projects supported by European Union.

She is the project consultant of Teatro Metastasio di Prato for the training sector.

Since 2012 she is the Executive Chief Officer of the Florence International Choir Festival and she realized the launching of the first edition, focusing particularly on marketing and communications, executive management, public relations and relations with the authorities.

The following are the most important recent activities:
Throughout the year 2011 she was Marketing and and Development consultant for the Associazione Maggio Fiorentino Formazione which is the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Training Academy.

In 2008 and 2009 she was the cultural consultant to the UN for the development programme UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) concerning international cooperation in the Maghreb region. In 2009 she organised a music and theatre atélier in Fès (Morocco) as part of the project entitled "La représentation culturelle et artistique de la femme dans la zone euro-méditerranéenne".

Carla Zanin was production director for three editions (in 2007, 2008 and 2009) of the Magna Graecia Teatro Festival, the travelling theatre event held among the archeological sites in the Calabria Region - Italy.

Milan Kolena is a conductor, artistic director of Bratislava Music Festivals, teacher of choral conducting and Gregorian Chant at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava and the president of Slovak Choral Association. With his choir Apollo and Schola Gregoriana Bratislavensis Milan Kolena visited many prestigious choral competitions. In 2014 he gave lectures at three American universities: Illinois Wesleyan University School, University of Missouri School of Music, Colorado State University, topic: The Question of the Interpretation of Latin texts in Sacred Choral Music. He frequently works as a member of the jury at many international choral and orchestral competitions in Slovakia, Europe and Asia. He was awarded the best conductor special prize of the "Singing World" choral competition in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2015. In the same year he held choral workshops in China and Hong Kong. 

Ester Maria Castriota,soprano, graduated in Singing and Vocal Chamber Music under the guidance of Liliana Poli at the Cherubini Music Conservatory in Florence. She specialized in the opera repertoire with Daniel Ferro, Anastasia Tomaszeswka and with Dalton Baldwin, Liliana Poli and Julia Hamari in the Lieder and contemporary repertoire.As a soloist and in Chamber music ensembles she participates in concert seasons and festivals in Italy and abroad.(Amici della Musica in Modena, Florence, Ravenna-Festival, G.A.M.O in Florence, IUC in Rome, Symphony in Perigord, etc.). She collaborates with various ensembles: Art-Music (Gesualdo da Venosa, 4th book of madrigals), Cappella Artemisia(C. Margherita Cozzolani, Vespri), A Seivoci(C. Monteverdi, Moral and Spiritual Selva) She plays roles in Monteverdi's Orfeo (Ravenna Alighieri Theatre) Dido and Aeneas by Purcell (Florence, Palazzo Vecchio), in Erminia sul Giordano by Michelangelo Rossi (Pistoia), in the Folksongs by Luciano Berio in scenic form (Parma Studio Theatre),in La Bohème (Rome). She wins the third prize in the competition Valentino Bucchi, "il canto nel 900"(Rome 1996). She has recorded for Dynamic,Tactus, Edipan, Esperia record companies. She is professor of singing at the L. Cherubini Consevatory in Florence

She studies music in the Conservatory of the University of Costa Rica, where she was born, and the Technical School of Music in Colchester, England, where she graduated in conducting and choral conducting. Since 1981 she lives in Italy where she works in musical education for children and choir training and conduction of children and youth voices, attending at the same time advanced courses in the field of music education and choral conducting at the Centre for the Research in the teaching of Music in Fiesole (Florence) with the Bulgarian teachers Robev G. and S. Vidas and the Italian F. Corti and R. Gabbiani; and various seminars on different teaching techniques such as Dalcroze Method (Marie L. Hatt-Arnold), improvisation in teaching (Violeta Hemsy) and vocal technique (W. Blazer and Fanny Mednikarova). In Florence she attended various seminars for choir conductors, organized by the Center of Vocalism and Early Music, "L'Homme Armé" , given by maestro Arman H. and A. L. King. From 1981 to 1986 she works in Montepulciano (Siena) for the Cantiere of International Art where she created and conducted several choirs.
From 1986 to 2003 she conducted the choir of children voices Guido Monaco in Prato and created the youth choir with which she collaborates regularly with the theater of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in the productions of the opera repertoire with the children's choir.
Since 2004 she created and conducted the choir of the singer boys in Florence at the Music Association F. Landini with which she continues the fruitful collaboration with the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino always with great conductors such as Metha, Osawa, Byshkov.
Since 2012 she participates in the Turandot conducted by Metha in the New Opera House in Florence, since 2013 in the Tosca at the Theater of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. In 2014 she conducted in the same theater "The Little Chimney Sweeper" with the singer boys choir of Florence and in May 2014 she participated with the same choir to the Opening Gala at the New Opera Theatre in Florence.