Notes In Viaggio: la Verdi in concert with Julian Prégardien and Alondra de la Parra, 3rd Oct. 2021

The la Verdi symphonic season at the Milan Auditorium opens with the concert Note di viaggio, scheduled for Thursday 30 September at 8.30 pm, Friday 1 October at 8.00 pm and Sunday 3 October at 4.00 pm.

Milan – The tenor Julian Prégardien is engaged in the performance of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen by Gustav Mahler (in the version for chamber orchestra by Arnold Schönberg), in addition to the Cinq mélodies populaires grecques by Maurice Ravel (in the version for voice and orchestra by Manuel Rosenthal ). The program is completed by Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring orchestral suite (in the version for 13 instruments) and Le Bœuf sur le toit op. 58 by Darius Milhaud.

A program that sums up the cosmopolitan spirit of the Giuseppe Verdi Symphony Orchestra of Milan: a journey around the world that from Copland’s United States leads to Mahler’s Bohemia, passing through France and Greece imagined by Ravel, up to Brazil transfigured in Milhaud’s eyes. All together with the voice of a German tenor, under the baton of a wonderful conductor of Mexican origins: Alondra de la Parra, a musician with a unique charisma, who embodies an admirable synthesis of passion and musical intuition.

An iridescent program, which evokes different climates and atmospheres, in continuously different cultural horizons: Appalachian Spring, an orchestral suite taken from the homonymous ballet that Copland wrote in 1944, and which tells the story of a spring celebration of nineteenth-century American colonists. A music so distinctly connotating the American spirit that it was chosen as the theme song for the historic CBS Reports news program. The Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, performed for the first time in 1896 (in a program that contained the First Symphony by the same author, which borrowed from the Lieder the emblematic theme of the first movement), are one of the most complete musical representations of a troubled journey interior, being a poetic chronicle of a painful private affair, that is the unhappy love for the singer Johanna Richter, prima donna at the Kassel Opera, theater where Mahler served from 1883 to 1885, conquering the first high successes of his conducting career .

The folkloric atmospheres of Maurice Ravel’s Cinq mélodies populaires grecques were collected by his friend Michel Calvacoressi, who asked Ravel to harmonize them to accompany a lecture by Pierre Aubry at the Ecole des hautes études. Dated 1906, they have been harmonized so effectively that it is believed that harmony and melody have been achieved together. Le boeuf sur le toit op. 58 by Darius Milhaud is often the result of the reworking of numerous Brazilian themes (first of all that of the Brazilian song O Boi no Telhado, which means, precisely, the ox on the roof), collected and stylized within a ballet-pantomime composed in 1919 on a text by Jean Cocteau.The la Verdi symphonic season at the Milan Auditorium opens with the concert Note di viaggio, scheduled for Thursday 30 September at 8.30 pm, Friday 1 October at 8.00 pm and Sunday 3 October at 4.00 pm.

Milan – The tenor Julian Prégardien is engaged in the performance of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen by Gustav Mahler (in the version for chamber orchestra by Arnold Schönberg), in addition to the Cinq mélodies populaires grecques by Maurice Ravel (in the version for voice and orchestra by Manuel Rosenthal ). The program is completed by Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring orchestral suite (in the version for 13 instruments) and Le Bœuf sur le toit op. 58 by Darius Milhaud.

A program that sums up the cosmopolitan spirit of the Giuseppe Verdi Symphony Orchestra of Milan: a journey around the world that from Copland’s United States leads to Mahler’s Bohemia, passing through France and Greece imagined by Ravel, up to Brazil transfigured in Milhaud’s eyes. All together with the voice of a German tenor, under the baton of a wonderful conductor of Mexican origins: Alondra de la Parra, a musician with a unique charisma, who embodies an admirable synthesis of passion and musical intuition.

An iridescent program, which evokes different climates and atmospheres, in continuously different cultural horizons: Appalachian Spring, an orchestral suite taken from the homonymous ballet that Copland wrote in 1944, and which tells the story of a spring celebration of nineteenth-century American colonists. A music so distinctly connotating the American spirit that it was chosen as the theme song for the historic CBS Reports news program. The Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, performed for the first time in 1896 (in a program that contained the First Symphony by the same author, which borrowed from the Lieder the emblematic theme of the first movement), are one of the most complete musical representations of a troubled journey interior, being a poetic chronicle of a painful private affair, that is the unhappy love for the singer Johanna Richter, prima donna at the Kassel Opera, theater where Mahler served from 1883 to 1885, conquering the first high successes of his conducting career .

The folkloric atmospheres of Maurice Ravel’s Cinq mélodies populaires grecques were collected by his friend Michel Calvacoressi, who asked Ravel to harmonize them to accompany a lecture by Pierre Aubry at the Ecole des hautes études. Dated 1906, they have been harmonized so effectively that it is believed that harmony and melody have been achieved together. Le boeuf sur le toit op. 58 by Darius Milhaud is often the result of the reworking of numerous Brazilian themes (first of all that of the Brazilian song O Boi no Telhado, which means, precisely, the ox on the roof), collected and stylized within a ballet-pantomime composed in 1919 on a text by Jean Cocteau.