The Maggio’s principal conductor, Maestro Daniele Gatti, takes the podium on Friday, March 10th, at 8 pm in the Sala Grande of the Theatre for a symphonic concert with a strong focus on the ‘aesthetic’ side with, on the music stands, the Concerto in D minor op. 3, RV 565 by Antonio Vivaldi, the penultimate of the twelve concertos in the L’estro armonico series, published with Estienne Roget to make a name for themselves outside Italy; followed by Johann Sebastian Bach’s Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen BWV 51, which was first performed on September 17th, 1730 at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. Igor Stravinsky’s Pulcinella was closing the concert, which represents one of the earliest stages of the composer’s neoclassical period and was written at the dawn of 1920. As Maestro Gatti himself pointed out, it partly ‘anticipates’ by two days the premiere of The Rake’s Progress, scheduled to take place in the Mehta Hall on Sunday, March 12th.
A programme, therefore, strongly focused on the ‘aesthetic’ side as underlined in his analysis by Daniele Gatti: “Speaking of Stravinsky’s production, the longest period that we can note is the so-called neoclassical one that covers almost thirty years, from the early 1920s to the early 1950s. One of the earliest compositions marking this part of his oeuvre is Pulchinella, which will close the concert on March 10th, while Rake’s Progress marks the end of the neoclassical phase of Stravinsky’s work, ideally closing a musical journey. I, therefore, find it really interesting to ‘anticipate’ the Rake’s with a concert that perfectly matches and strongly focuses on aesthetics, with Vivaldi’s Concerto in D minor and Bach’s Jauchzet Gott Landen also on the programme, ‘teasing’ the audience with a small but intriguing two-evening musical journey through a crucial musical period of Stravinsky’s”.
In the performance of Jauchzet Gott, the celebrated soprano Jessica Pratt returning to the Maggio after the performances of Ariadne auf Naxos in June 2022 conducted by Maestro Gatti himself, and Professor Claudio Quintavalla, of the Orchestra del Maggio, on trumpet, are called upon as soloists. The three solo voices in the performance of Pulchinella are Eleonora Filipponi, recently starring in last October’s symphony concert alongside Zubin Mehta; Joseph Dahdah, a talent recently trained at the Accademia del Maggio and recently starring, again under Gatti’s baton, in the Don Carlo that closed the Maggio’s Autumn Festival; and Lodovico Filippo Ravizza, a current Accademia artist.
