Lyniv, Shaham

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Adriano Guarnieri (1947) is one of the leading figures in contemporary music. His works represent one of the most seductive hypotheses for renewing and bringing up to date the music of our time, able to exert a strong emotional pull on the listener thanks to the magmatic intensity of his instrumental colours and, in the theatre, to the explosive expressive energy of the voices, placed at the service of crucial civic themes as well. «In una notte stellata», the composer’s Sixth Concerto for orchestra alone, is a commission from the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna, given here in its world première.

After hearing the very young Erich Wolfgang Korngold play, son of one of the most influential German-language critics, Gustav Mahler said he had met a genius. Everyone was convinced of it, above all in Vienna, a city perhaps unconsciously eager to build a new Mozart myth while, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the Habsburg empire took its last steps in waltz time. Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) was indeed one of the most brilliant figures of the twentieth century, able to create music as complex as it is immediately understandable. Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) is an operatic masterpiece mixing psychological unease, sensuality and the grotesque: that it was conceived by a twenty-year-old is extraordinary. But young Erich’s trajectory was broken by the rise of Nazism. Having fled to America, Korngold found in Hollywood an alternative outlet for his overflowing melodic vein, at the cost of being engaged only as a writer of film scores. When he returned to Europe, Korngold tried to re-establish himself as a composer of absolute music. The Violin Concerto, an absolute masterpiece, reabsorbs the elements of his acquired cinematic culture but turns them into a post-Romantic, modernist language. The work was first performed in 1947 by Jascha Heifetz and is dedicated to Alma Mahler, Gustav’s widow.
Symphony no. 6 in B minor op. 74, «Pathétique»

The Symphony no. 6 in B minor, «Pathétique» — the name given by Modest Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich’s brother and collaborator — was the great Russian composer’s last work; he died nine days after conducting its first performance on 28 October 1893 in St Petersburg. The score was dedicated to his nephew Vladimir Davydov, to whom he confided that he had a «programme» in mind for the symphony, though it was never revealed. Mysteries still unsolved have gathered around Tchaikovsky’s death. Was it a suicide forced on him after the scandal that touched him and became known in the upper reaches of society? Or a simple but fatal poisoning from infected water? The answers have never reconstructed the exact sequence of events. And they still lend a mysterious fascination to one of the most beautiful symphonic works of any age.
ORCHESTRA OF TEATRO COMUNALE DI BOLOGNA