Dazzling light and deep darkness alternate in a programme that sees the return of Leonidas Kavakos with the Brahms Violin Concerto, a masterpiece of irrepressible melodic exuberance whose luminous vision of the world is dramatically counterbalanced by two rarely performed twentieth-century works, now dedicated to the plight of Iranian women: Witold Lutosławski’s Funeral Music, composed in 1954 in memory of Béla Bartók, and Benjamin Britten’s Requiem Symphony, submitted in 1940 for the Japanese government’s competition to mark the 2,600^thanniversary of the founding of the empire. Rejected as inappropriate, the work was a revelation in New York, where it launched the theatrical career of the greatest English composer of the 20^thcentury.

The Programme

Franco Battiato premiered his Messa arcaicain the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi in 1993: what looked like a simple sacred composition, including the canonical Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei, was in fact something very different in terms of compositional technique. After all, Battiato was a master of sound, and had explored the possibilities of acoustic instruments (among which the human voice) in generating different perception and creating a sense of suspension. «Most human beings do not realise they have a soul; they only listen to their bodies. But at night, and not while we sleep, we all leave our bodies to go on astral journeys», he often repeated. These journeys also concern his Canzoni mistiche, collected here by some of his collaborators as the evidence of an incessant spiritual quest for an unknown elsewhere.

credits Nicola Cisternino, Franco Battiato Caminantes – Venezia-Istambul, (2021)

The Programme

“A respectful homage to the genre of the string quartet”: how else could we define a programme that combines three landmarks in the repertoire dedicated to the most “noble” of chamber music ensembles, which also share an intensely poetic vein? Haydn’s “Russian” Quartet, which Mozart especially loved, the first in a series that the composer himself defined as «a new and entirely special kind, for I haven’t written any for ten years», will be followed by the work that established Schumann’s maturity in the difficult sphere of the string quartet, and then by the unmistakable twelve-tone lyricism of Alban Berg. All titles will be performed by the multi-award-winning Arete Quartet, born in September 2019 of the encounter of four young and talented Korean musicians, now associated with the prestigious Fiesole School of Music.

The Programme

«In my head I have a symphony, which I’d like to call Rome[…]. It’s an excellent plan: Venice will be my Andante, Rome my first movement, Florence my Scherzo, and Naples my Finale. It is a new idea, I believe». In 1860, on his way back from a three-year stay at the Villa Medici, Bizet was inebriated by the Italian art and landscapes, and this beauty ideally underpins his unusual score. Liszt, too, had experimented a similar narrative impetus in his symphonic poems, the most famous of which, Les préludes, he “justified” by ascribing its continuous thematic metamorphosis to Lamartine’s Méditations. The same momentum also permeates the evocative “fairy tale scene” written in 1908 by Russian composer Lyadov, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov and, in his turn, the teacher of Prokofiev. Three musical frescoes which Muti outlines in all their nuances and depth, in a tireless search for perfection.

The Programme

The onset of the Renaissance in music takes place in the different countries of the Old Continent between the XV and early XVI centuries. Such are the space-time coordinates for this selection of sacred and secular pieces in Latin and Romance languages, conceived for musical chapels in Italy, Spain, France and the Netherlands, and now re-proposed by the Orlando Consort. Since its 1988 début in the Early Music Network of Great Britain, the prestigious male vocal quartet has made a worldwide reputation for unparalleled quality and ductility, with forays in jazz as well as world music. Unquestionably among the most authoritative interpreters of medieval and Renaissance polyphony, the Orlando Consort will once again transform the most rigorous research on compositional techniques and notation systems into the most explosive expression of the “rebirth” and aesthetic renewal of music.

The Programme

Brahms was already 43 when he introduced himself to the world as a symphonist. He feared he could not bear the weight of Beethoven’s legacy. This was an excess of caution, judging by the extraordinary results of his first two symphonies, and by the further masterpiece of the Third, which sums up the most diverse expressive needs in a continuum of heroism, tragedy, pathos, and nostalgia, to die away in a reconciling pianissimo. The film industry is heavily indebted to this symphony, widely adapted in works of popular culture. Similarly, Shahrazād, the most dazzling symphonic fresco of the Russian XIX century, also comes to a fantastic, lyrical and finally pacified conclusion after “visually” bringing to life the evocative and timeless East of the adventures narrated by Rimsky-Korsakov, which the great Hungarian conductor now entrusts to the talent of “his” orchestra.

The Programme

«I was somewhat restless and rather unwell… Today I busied myself with my Serenade, and immediately began to feel cheerful, well and relaxed». This is how Tchaikovsky recounted the genesis of one of the most splendid gems in his catalogue, polished according to the expressive formulas of Classicism into a mental space where his restless soul could be at peace. This logic, musical order, clarity and balance are the same traits that we find in the Concerto for Violin and Oboe by Bach, who had already absorbed the lesson of Vivaldi, and in the rare Nocturne by Johann Michael Haydn, the younger brother of the more famous Joseph, with whom he disputed the paternity of this small masterpiece of refined entertainment that brings us back to the atmosphere of late XVIII century Mitteleuropa.

The Programme