It is a great pleasure to be back at the helm of the Orchestra del Teatro La Fenice for the two performances, on Saturday 5th and Sunday 6th February at the Teatro Malibran, of this programme which is part of the 2021-2022 concert season. I am a frequent guest for opera productions at La Fenice and have been looking forward with great pleasure to taking on works from the symphonic repertoire, conducting this orchestra that I know well in the Robert Schumann Symphony no. 3 in E flat major op. 97 (the ‘Rhenish’ Symphony) and the Fryderyk Chopin Concerto no. 1 in E minor for piano and orchestra op. 11 with young pianist Elia Cecino.

Composed in 1830, Chopin wrote his Concerto no. 1 when he was just twenty years old and already showing his genius and it oozes with extraordinary creativity, exceptional expressive energy and a sonorous beauty that stems from the balance between creative freedom and expressive soundness.

The Third Symphony in E flat major op. 97 by Robert Schumann belongs to the final period of his work, at a time of creative verve following his move to Düsseldorf, where he had accepted the post of concert music director in 1850. Schumann himself conducted its first performance there on 6th February 1851. Coming several years after the greatly tormented, feverish, visionary Second Symphony, the Third Symphony is profoundly different in nature, and this is usually associated with the short-lived happiness of his early months in Düsseldorf. The name Rhenish comes not from Schumann, but from the testimony of Joseph Wilhelm von Wasielewski, his first biographer and assistant in Düsseldorf. According to Wasielewski, Schumann had come up with some strikingly evocative titles for two of the central movements; but he removed them, so as to prevent them from being seen as ‘programmes’ in their own right.  Aside from the removal of the titles, the character, the poetic idea, the Stimmung of the Third Symphony are connected to Schumann’s Germanism, to the romantic cult of the German homeland and to one of the key elements of that cult, the ‘religion of the Rhine’: the Rhine as landscape of the soul, as a legend that unites historical memories, artistic traditions and the mystical, poetic experience of nature’s splendour. In a word, our concert will be an in-depth immersion in the purest Romanticism of Chopin and of Schumann.

La clemenza di Tito is being performed for the first time in Bilbao, so it is an honour for me to fulfil such an important task. What is more, it is with a feeling of belonging that I am back at ABAO-Bilbao to conduct something totally new for its members. This is my eighth production in Basque country since my 2005 debut with La Sonnambula, and it is a great joy to be reunited with the musicians of the Basque National Orchestra with whom I conducted Lucia di Lammermoor in 2019, for which I received the Ópera XXI association’s prestigious award.

La clemenza di Tito, Mozart’s last opera, recalls stylistic elements from the golden age of opera seria, a world which reached its culmination with Gluck and then began its decline. The opera, composed to celebrate the coronation as King of Bohemia of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II of Hapsburg, was set to music by Mozart with Metastasio’s libretto revised for the occasion by Caterino Mazzolà, reduced from three to two acts, with the omission of a large amount of recitative and transformation of several of the arias into ensemble pieces. This tribute to the enlightened sovereign loses any legacy of grandeur and Mozart’s emperor appears in all his stature as a sovereign devoted to the common good. The fluidity of its musical structures paves the way for solutions that were to be taken up by Beethoven, Weber and Rossini in their works. 

The stage direction by Fabio Ceresa gets right to the heart of this vision, everything is clear, fluid and noble. I am sure that in Bilbao, with reduced seating because of the new health restrictions, the audiences at the five performances will feel privileged to watch and listen to this masterpiece live.