Magadino and its parish church held this organ festival for the first time on Saturday June 22, 1963.
Marcel Dupré, in one of the last of his concerts, opened the show before a large, waiting and dignified audience.
These were still times when people went to a concert in their best attire and you did not applaud in churches. To compensate for the lack of applause during the concert, the idea of warmly welcoming the performers on the church square at the end of the concert started from Magadino itself.
The atmosphere of the church also suffered from this constraint: the pieces were announced by placards carried by children dressed as altar boys and girls.
The brilliant success of that first edition was that the organizers found the motivation and stimulus to continue the experience which has now lasted for almost 50 years.
The first edition of our festival was held at a baptism, later by the cited maestro Dupré, by Luigi Favini of Magadino, by Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini, by Victor Togni (who prematurely passed away in 1965 at only 30 years old), by Gaston Litaize, by Alessandro Esposito, by Hans Vollenweider and by Fernando Germani.
And on that occasion the First International Prize for an organ composition was announced: “Gambarogno – Lago Maggiore 1964” [‘Gambarogno – Lake Maggiore 1964’], organized by the Circolo di Cultura del Gambarogno [Gambarogno cultural circle] and by the then Pro Gambarogno.
The Magadino organ festival began a very rich human experience for its sponsors (the maestro Carlo Florindo Semini, Reverend Aldo Lanini, Manfredo Patocchi – who then presided over the Circolo di Cultura – Eros Ratti, President of the then Pro Gambarogno and Federico Alluisetti: contacts with personalities of different cultural extraction and different practices – who are taken by the frenetic artistic activity, who are enthused by the landscape,who are subject to the political provisions of their countries of origin and who are however hindered by too many commitments and bureaucracy which derive from these.
