Opera Tickets Italy

The esteemed Italian conductor Giulio Prandi takes charge at Venice's Teatro Malibran this season for a concert featuring three distinct works by George Frideric Handel, Igor Stravinsky and Alfredo Casella. Spanning the centuries, this carefully curated programme of orchestral music will appeal to all lovers of great music, thanks to the highly regarded La Fenice Orchestra and such an acclaimed musicologist and maestro at the podium.

The concert begins with a rendition of Organ Concerto No 13 in F major, HWV 295, by Handel, otherwise known as 'The Cuckoo and the Nightingale'. This Baroque work is set out in four movements. Handel's manuscript for the score indicates that he completed the composition on 2 April 1739. Given that two days later, the premiere of Israel in Egypt – the composer's Biblical oratorio – would take place in London, it is highly likely that the concerto was first performed as a musical interlude during it on 4 April 1739. A gifted organist, Handel had already written five concertos for the instrument since 1735. 'The Cuckoo and the Nightingale' went on to establish itself as among the most popular of such works, securing its place in the Baroque orchestral repertoire to this day.

Stravinsky's Concerto in E-flat major is next on the programme. Commissioned by Robert Woods Bliss, a senior American diplomat, and his wife for their thirtieth wedding anniversary, it is often referred to as 'Dumbarton Oaks'. This nickname refers to the couple's estate of the same name in Washington, DC, where they lived and where the work was premiered on 8 May 1938. Though original, the three-movement concerto was somewhat inspired by the Brandenburg Concertos written over two centuries earlier by JS Bach. Their influence can be detected in the way Stravinsky passes musical ideas between different instruments within the chamber ensemble, creating intricate textures. Nevertheless, its shifting rhythms and distinctive harmonic language ensure the work is unmistakably his.

The concert's finale consists of Casella's Concerto, Op. 40bis. Originally composed as a string quartet – Concerto, Op. 40 – this fine example of 20th-century chamber music was first performed in its original format on 28 March 1924 in Rome. The concerto was subsequently arranged in 1927 for a string orchestra by Erwin Stein, the Austrian musician and writer, who was a prominent disciple of Arnold Schoenberg. Stein reinterpreted Casella's original quartet for the greater weight and breadth of a string orchestra while retaining the interplay between individual musical lines that characterise the original. It is the Stein version, in its four-movement format, that brings the final musical flourish to this event.

With such an acclaimed conductor and three fine examples of outstanding concerti, this concert at Teatro Malibran in Venice is set to bring a fascinating and contrasting range of musical styles to the stage.