Lully / Schubert / Strauss, Kent Nagano
The esteemed American conductor, Kent Nagano, takes charge of the skilful La Fenice Orchestra at Venice's Gran Teatro Opera House for a series of concerts featuring works by Jean-Baptiste Lully, Franz Schubert and Richard Strauss. These performances are sure to delight audiences thanks not only to the brilliance of the maestro and musicians but also to the wonderful acoustics of the venue.
The programme opens with some ballet music, Lully's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. This music was composed by the Frenchman for a comédie-ballet written by Molière with choreography by Pierre Beauchamp. The first performance of the production took place for the court of King Louis XIV at the Château of Chambord in the Loire Valley on 14 October 1670, staged by the playwright's own company. Although the production was written by Molière in a prose format, the balletic opening scenes were in verse. These Venetian concerts commence with the overture and ballet music that Lully wrote for the start of the play.
Schubert's Symphony No. 3 in D major D. 200 follows. This composition was written over the course of several weeks in 1815 when the Austrian was preparing to work as a schoolteacher. He began writing his third symphony on May 24 and had completed it by June 19. At the time, the young composer was studying under the renowned maestro Antonio Salieri and he also managed to score other compositions during this intense period of his life. Relatively short by the standards of the time, Schubert's Third Symphony is rhythmically fast over the course of its four movements. Like much of his other work, the Third Symphony remained unpublished until after the death of its creator.
The final part of the concert returns to Molière with another musical interpretation of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. Nagano conducts a suite of incidental music drawn from Richard Strauss' Der Bürger als Edelmann, Op. 60. Strauss initially collaborated with an Austrian librettist named Hugo von Hofmannsthal who came up with the idea of adapting Le Bourgeois gentilhomme into a simpler play, adding some incidental music to it. In addition, a one-act opera in German, Ariadne auf Naxos, would be performed after the play. The idea flopped after its initial performances, however, and was subsequently reworked. Strauss elected to breathe new life into the incidental music he had written for the initial concept, developing it into an orchestral suite, the one audiences can enjoy at this concert.
Nagano is widely regarded as one of the most outstanding conductors today for both operatic performances and orchestral repertoire. He was appointed as an Honorary Conductor of the Philharmonic State Orchestra of Hamburg in 2023 and has served as the General Music Director of the Hamburg State Opera since 2015.