Opera Tickets Italy

The Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Orchestra performs works by two Russian greats, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Dmitri Shostakovich, in a concert programme conducted by the highly regarded British maestro, Alexander Soddy. The conductor has an established relationship with the Florentine stage of the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, having been involved with productions of Giuseppe Verdi's Macbeth and Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde there before. This programme showcases Soddy's skill as an orchestral conductor, with renditions of two exceptional works.

The concert opens with Tchaikovsky's Concerto in D major, Op. 35, for violin and orchestra, a work he composed in 1878 while he was spending time recuperating from an emotional breakdown following his short-lived marriage. Tchaikovsky had travelled to Clarens in Switzerland at this time, where the maestro heard the Symphonie espagnole in D minor for the first time, played by the eminent violinist, Iosif Kotek. A work for violin and orchestra by Édouard Lalo, it had premiered in Paris in 1875. It excited Tchaikovsky greatly, leading him to set aside the piano sonata he had been working on to turn to a violin concerto of his own. The resulting work was completed in April but it was deemed unplayable by the leading Russian violinist of his day, Leopold Auer. Partly as a consequence of Auer's criticism of the concerto, it did not go on to receive its first public performance until 4 December 1881 in Vienna, when conducted by Hans Richter. Structured in three movements, it has gone on to become one of the best-known such concertos in the classical music repertoire.

The programme continues with Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47, composed by Shostakovich between April and July 1937. Written under the artistic constraints placed on all composers working in the Soviet Union at that time, Shostakovich felt under even more pressure because his preceding works had come under criticism. With his new symphony, the Russian maestro sought to balance his artistic integrity with the need to write music that would be acceptable to the Soviet regime. An expression of the human spirit, the work produces an impression of dissent and defiance with a sense of tension that runs through. Although the Fifth Symphony is in keeping with some of the traditions of the classical music period, it offers elements of modernism and dissonance here and there, reflecting its character as a work which, to many, challenges conventions while working within them.

Born in 1982, Alexander Soddy has earned an international reputation as a guest conductor. At the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, he takes up the baton for a programme that brings together the lyricism of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and the power of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.