Returning to conduct the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini is always a great pleasure. This time, it’s an even greater satisfaction because I’m inaugurating the fourth edition of the Toscanini Festival, the tribute which the Foundation that bears the name of the legendary conductor has organized each summer since 2022 in Parma and some of the other most beautiful historical and artistic settings in the province. Our programme includes Mendelssohn’s Hebrides overture and the Beethoven Symphony no. 4: two works that I love for the richness of their ideas and orchestration but above all because, despite the thirty years that separate their creation, they narrate through music the new world which, from Beethoven onwards, was to become the realm of the Romantics. In between, we’re performing the Haydn Concerto no. 1 for cello and orchestra, entrusted to the exceptional talent of Philipp Schupelius from Berlin. Still in his early twenties, his name became familiar last year when Classic FM selected him as one of their Thirty Most Exciting Young Musicians in the World, but he is already a mature artist who breathes captivating new life into this work by a youthful Haydn. I think that the full programme is fascinating for the references in some of its pages to the moods and contours of a recent past, and that this feeling is intensified by the inclusion of Beethoven’s Fourth, resulting from a particularly successful year for the composer, 1806, with its stirring and only occasionally mysterious outpouring particularly in the Adagio, which enchanted Berlioz to the extent that he wrote that it ‘seems to have been breathed by the archangel Michael when, seized with a fit of melancholy, he contemplated the universe, standing on the threshold of the Empyrean’. From there to the perpetual motion of the prodigious Finale à la Haydn, it is with deep conviction that I have included this perfect, unjustly neglected symphony.