Opera Tickets Italy

Three distinctive works of 20th-century music form the programme of this concert at Venice's Gran Teatro La Fenice. The music of Ottorino Respighi, Alfredo Casella and Dmitri Shostakovich will be performed by the theatre’s talented orchestra under the baton of Riccardo Frizza. The Italian maestro, who serves as Musical Director and Artistic Director of the Bergamo Donizetti Opera Festival, is a sought-after conductor of both opera and symphonic repertoire, having worked with leading orchestras all around the world.

Respighi's four-movement symphonic poem, Le fontane di Roma, or Fountains of Rome in English, opens the concert. The great maestro Arturo Toscanini was scheduled to conduct its premiere in late 1916 but the performance had to be postponed following the public's hostile reaction to a work by Richard Wagner that Toscanini had conducted some weeks earlier. Consequently, Le fontane di Roma went on to be premiered under Antonio Guarnieri on 11 March 1917 at Rome's Teatro Augusteo where it was considered to be a flop. However, Toscanini eventually conducted it in February 1918 in Milan with the La Scala Orchestra when it was much better received, helping to establish Respighi's name as one of the foremost Italian orchestral composers of his generation.

A rendition of Casella's The Jar, Suite from the ballet, Op. 41a, follows. Casella extracted musical highlights from the ballet score he wrote for La giara (The Jar) to create the suite, dividing it into two main parts. This ballet was choreographed by the Swedish dancer Jean Börlin in 1924 for the avant-garde Ballet Suedois, based in Paris. The opening section generates a lyrical atmosphere, depicting a warm Sicilian morning. The second section is based on a chiovu, a traditional and rhythmically infectious Sicilian folk dance.

The finale of this delightfully curated concert consists of a performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 in e minor, Op. 93. First performed by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra on 17 December 1953, the work signalled a return to the symphonic form by Shostakovich: his previous one, the Ninth Symphony had premiered as far back as 1945. The great Russian composer had increasingly written film scores in the intervening period because some of his other output was rejected by the Soviet authorities for lacking 'social purpose'. Following the death of Stalin and the ensuing shift in political priorities, Shostakovich was able to make a return to the symphonic form. His Tenth Symphony marked this comeback and is noteworthy for its superb pacing, tension building and dramatic contrasts.

With Riccardo Frizza conducting a superb Venetian orchestra and three spellbinding orchestral pieces on the programme, this concert at Gran Teatro La Fenice promises an engaging journey through 20th-century music.