Opera Tickets Italy

The music of America takes centre stage at Venice's Malibran Theatre when John Axelrod, the acclaimed maestro, conducts the superb La Fenice Orchestra in a varied programme featuring a trio of pieces by US composers. Born in Houston, Texas in 1966, Axelrod was named as the Music Director and Principal Conductor of the Swiss National Orchestra in 2023. Since 1996, he has taken charge of almost 200 orchestras around the globe in a career that includes work on 35 operas and 65 world premieres.

The concert begins with Michael Daugherty's Route 66, an orchestral work commissioned by the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra. It was first performed on 25 April 1998 by that ensemble under the direction of Yoshimi Takeda. The premiere was for the opening concert of the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, known now as “The Gilmore Piano Festival”, at the Miller Auditorium on the campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The music celebrates America's most famous highway, a route that has become a legend thanks to numerous films and songs that feature it in some way. There's an astonishing tuba solo that represents a sole traffic light while the rest of the piece largely focuses on the open, flowing road. Daugherty is a multiple Grammy Award-winning composer and pianist originally from Iowa.

Aaron Copland's much-loved Appalachian Spring follows. Written as ballet music for the American choreographer Martha Graham, this piece was first performed to accompany Graham's distinctive choreographic style on 30 October 1944 at the Coolidge Auditorium in Washington DC. Copland produced a concert suite from the ballet the following year, cutting around ten minutes from its original running time. Further revisions were made in the 1950s and various versions are now presented as concert pieces from the numerous iterations of it that exist.

Composed between 1897 and 1902, Symphony No. 2 by Charles Ives concludes the Americana programme. Arranged in five movements, the work was premiered by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of none other than Leonard Bernstein on 22 February 1951. Ives had been in his twenties when he wrote the symphony and was reportedly unimpressed when he first heard it being played on the radio so many years later. The piece is notable for its use of many American folk songs and melodies that are shaped and reshaped throughout it.

Fans of American music who enjoy exploring the culture of the so-called New World as it reflected and influenced European traditions in the twentieth century will, no doubt, find this a fascinating concert to attend, not least because of Axelrod's reputation for excellence in his field.