Bizet / Tchaikovsky, D. Callegari
Works by two greats of 19th-century composition, Georges Bizet and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, will be performed at the Malibran Theatre in Venice in a programme conducted by Daniele Callegari. The highly regarded Italian conductor has served as the Principal Conductor of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Nice and as Chief Conductor of the Royal Flanders Philharmonic Orchestra in Antwerp before. Born in Milan, the maestro has led major symphonic orchestras all over the world, including the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI in his home country. This programme features two superb symphonies in a bill designed to provide concertgoers with a compelling musical experience.
Written in 1855, Bizet's Symphony in C major is arranged in four movements, an allegro vivo, an adagio, a menuetto in a scherzo format and an allegro vivace finale. The work is unusual for two reasons. Firstly, it is the only symphony that the great French composer completed without considerable revisions – unlike his other work in the genre, Souvenirs de Rome, or the Roma Symphony, which underwent many changes after its first performance in 1863. Secondly, the Symphony in C major was not premiered until 26 February 1935, some six decades after the composer's death in 1875. Bizet wrote the symphony when he was a 17-year-old student, but it remained unknown. In the 1930s, however, musicologists had been publishing and sharing articles about it. The Austrian conductor, Felix Weingartner, came to know of its existence and it was he who subsequently conducted it in public for the first time in Basel, Switzerland.
The other work on the programme is Tchaikovsky's so-called Little Russian symphony, composed and orchestrated in the latter half of 1872. The Russian composer went on to make minor alterations to the piece, properly titled Symphony No. 2 in C minor, Op. 17, early the following year. The first performance of the complete symphony subsequently took place in Moscow on 7 February 1873, although the composer had performed its finale at a private gathering at the home of Rimsky-Korsakov in Saint Petersburg the month before. Later, Tchaikovsky would go on to revise the work much more extensively, a task he undertook between December 1879 and January 1880. It is this later version of the Second Symphony that has entered the modern repertoire. Despite this, both are still occasionally performed, even though the Russian maestro certainly had no doubts about his preference, stating that only the 1880 version should henceforth be played.
Full of musical drama and evocative passages, both the symphonies on the bill at Teatro Malibran provide a great opportunity to hear the acclaimed La Fenice Orchestra working with such an illustrious conductor.