Riccardo Frizza/ Monica Bacelli — Schönberg and Mahler
About the Event
An orchestra of great tradition, Sergiu Celibidache, ZoltánPeskó, Vladimir Delman, Riccardo Chailly, Daniele Gatti, and Michele Mariotti have taken turns at its helm as music directors. Among the conductors who have led the ensemble are Gary Bertini, Myung‐Whun Chung, James Conlon, Pinchas Steinberg, Valery Gergiev, Eliau Inbal, Vladimir Jurowskij, Daniel Oren, Peter Maag, Neville Marriner, Kurt Masur, Riccardo Muti, Mstislav Rostropovič, Esa Pekka Salonen, Georg Solti, Christian Thielemann, Charles Dutoit, Georges Prêtre. The Teatro Comunale Orchestra is frequently invited abroad (Holland, Romania, Spain, France and Switzerland) and has participated in prestigious festivals (Amsterdam 1987, Parma 1990, Wiesbaden 1994, Santander 2004 and 2008, Aix en Provence 2005, Savonlinna 2006, Macau 2013, Muscat 2015, Guanajuato in Mexico 2017, Paris 2018). A privileged relationship with Japan has resulted in several tours, most recently in June 2019 in Osaka, Tokyo, Yokohama, Fukuoka, with Rigoletto and Il barbiere di Siviglia.
Alessandro Solbiati is also a very active composer in the genre of transcription, as demonstrated in Sei Lieder giovanili for female voice and orchestra, from Arnold Schoenberg’s original version for voice and piano. It is an orchestration of six Lieder selected from among the thirty‐two, with no opera number, that Schoenberg wrote between 1893 and 1899, and which reflect the path of a stylistic refinement – divided between Brahmsian models and a chromaticism of Wagnerian descent – oriented toward the construction of a personal identity. Solbiati, who had presented this work in Bologna in 2013 as part of the “Schoenberg Experience,” stamps the transcription under the banner of a visionary expressiveness, carving on the original a writing with a dreamlike character in a process of perpetual timbral transformation.
The trumpet fanfare that opens Mahler’s “Fifth Symphony” is not just any old incipit: it is an evocation of the composer’s childhood, a distant reminder of the barracks and the military marching past his parents’ home in Bohemia. The “Fifth” was composed between 1901 and 1902, in the midst of a decisive turning point: in November 1901 Mahler met the daughter of a Viennese painter, the fateful Alma Schindler (“the most beautiful woman in Vienna,” it was said) whom he married in March the following year. The fame of this Symphony has been fueled by cinema, thanks to Luchino Visconti’s masterful use of the Adagietto in “Death in Venice” and the recent film “Tár” with Cate Blanchett sublime as a conductor obsessed with the “Fifth.” Bruno Walter, perhaps the conductor who knew the Mahlerian universe most intimately, gave the symphony’s best definition, “passionate, wild music, full of pathos, spirited, solemn, delicate and full of all the sensations of the human soul.”
Practical Information
You must print out the order confirmation and show it at the box office to collect your regular ticket, starting one hour before the start of the concert, at the Teatro Manzoni, Via De' Monari 1/2.
Cast / Production
Orchestra del Teatro comunale di Bologna
Riccardo Frizza, conductor
Monica Bacelli, soprano
