Honegger / Piazzolla / Mozart
A concert of three carefully selected pieces by Arthur Honegger, Astor Piazzolla and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart comes to the Malibran Theatre's stage under the direction of the esteemed Italian conductor, Corrado Rovaris. The Music Director of Opera Philadelphia, Rovaris is known for his work in concert performances as well as for his extensive operatic directorial career. He has degrees from the Conservatory of Milan in composition, organ and harpsichord. For this performance, the maestro takes charge of the notable La Fenice Orchestra, widely regarded as Venice's foremost music ensemble.
The programme opens with Honegger's Pastorale d’été, or Summer Pastoral, which was first performed at the Salle Gaveau in Paris on 17 February 1921. Composed the previous summer while Honegger was on holiday in Wengen in Switzerland, it explores the beauty of the Swiss Alps. This peaceful, almost serene, work commences with a leisurely yet highly emotive theme played on a horn, later taken up by the strings. This appears to be the composer's poetic description of the alpine landscape at dawn, while the rest of the music continues in this vein as the sun continues to rise, casting new light on the landscape below.
The concert continues with music written by Piazzolla, the Argentine tango composer and bandoneon virtuoso. The astounding arrangement of this piece, Tres Tangos, lifts this musical style from the streets of Buenos Aires to the concert auditorium, highlighting how this musical form can move from song and dance to something that can stand up to anything else in the modern repertoire. Piazzolla first performed his Tres Tangos Sinfónicos, as the work was referred to then, in 1963 under the direction of Paul Klecky. In 1987, he returned to the piece, recording the three tangos with Lalo Schifrin and St. Luke's Orchestra at Princeton University.
Mozart's Symphony No. 38 in D major, K 504, concludes the concert programme. Written in late 1786, the work was first performed on 19 January 1787 in Prague. The symphony is noteworthy for Mozart's extensive use of woodwind instrumentation, something he no doubt thought would go down well with the concert-going class in that city. This may account for its common nickname, the Prague Symphony. Arranged in three movements without the usual minuet associated with such works at the time, the symphony begins with an adagio which shifts from major to minor tonalities before an allegro takes up the melody, in one of the most complex examples of this sonata-based format Mozart ever wrote. An andante second movement in G major and a presto finale, both in sonata forms, as well, follow, offering a rounded musical experience.
With the esteemed Rovaris conducting three seemingly such diverse pieces, audiences at Venice's Malibran Theatre are invited to consider the similarities and differences of each compositional style in what must be a fascinating form of musical entertainment.