On November 14th we will open our 18th symphonic season, in the University La Statale Great Hall, with our Music Director Alessandro Crudele. The program, as Sandro Zanon wrote quoting the famous romance by Ian Fleming “From Russia (and beyond) with love”, has a fil rouge which crosses the different pieces of the concert as an ideal journey through Russia for over a century: from the years of the ‘National Schools’ of the late Romanticism to the post-soviet era.

The opening piece is the “Prelude” from Modest Musorgskij’s Chovanščina, which confirms the ambition of the composer for the reborn of the “true” Russian national school, based on the valorization of the popular tradition. The work had a complicated gestation: Musorgskij composed it from 1872 to the end of his days, but leaving large voids in the orchestration, that was reconstructed by Dmitrij Šostakovič in 1959.

From Šostakovič, we will listen to the Concerto for piano n. 2 in F major, written in 1957 during the years of the cultural thaw which began with Stalin’s death and, therefore, although the classical proportions, marked by a certain but ambiguous “lightness”.
At the piano Anika Vavic, who returns with the Orchestra UniMi after two years from her debut with us.

The opera Prince Igor’ represents Aleksandr Borodin’s most important work. He was a member, as Musorgskij, of the Mighty Handful (supporters of the Russian popular culture revival). The tormented genesis of the opera, which Borodin started to write in 1869,  is similar to the one Musorgskij’s Chovanščina, since it was brought to an end by Rimskij-Korsakov in 1890. We will perform, according to a consolidated tradition, the Polovtsian Dances from Act II.

We talked about “from Russia (and beyond)” because the contemporary piece proposed in this concert is written by the composer Giya Kancheli, born in Georgia in 1935 and then moved in 1991 to the West after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Even the music of Kancheli is rooted in popular culture (in this case Georgian), an essential element of his entire production. The piece we will listen to, Sio (a Georgian word that means breeze, wind), was commissioned to him in 1998 by the Staatskapelle Dresden. Our performance will be the Italian Premiere.

Free admission for all the 2017/2018 season concerts upon registration >>> here. The 2016/17 Season registration is no longer valid.
The entrance is allowed until places are available.