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The overture to The Magic Flute is among Mozart’s most symbolic. In a few minutes it contains the essence of the opera: mystery, the search for truth, the light of knowledge that triumphs over darkness. The opening, with its majestic chords in E flat major, at once evokes a ritual, initiatory world, clearly inspired by the composer’s Masonic experience, begun in 1784 in the lodge «Zur Wohltätigkeit». The Allegro that follows, contrapuntal and luminous, reflects instead the rational, idealist spirit of the Enlightenment, while the harmonic shadows that creep into it foreshadow the conflicts and the trials awaiting the characters of the Singspiel, staged barely 66 days before the death of its brilliant creator.

To get an idea of how Maria Anna Mozart, known as «Nannerl», played, one should listen to her brother Wolfgang’s Concerto K. 365, the most affectionate and most challenging musical test born between two musicians with the same genes. Many clues tell us that this small masterpiece for two pianos and orchestra was meant to have the two siblings as soloists, both of them exceptional pianists. The dialogue between the two pianos, lively and full of imagination, allows us to picture them together at the keyboard, before fate decided to separate them. Nannerl, five years older, survived Wolfgang by 38 years, teaching into old age. She died in 1829, when the history of music had taken leave of Beethoven and Schubert too.
Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich

Composed in 1971, four years before his death, the Symphony no. 15 is the last stage of Dmitri Shostakovich’s long and tormented symphonic journey. But more than a conclusion, it seems an enigma. In the first movement a galloping quotation from Rossini’s William Tell rings out, but the tone soon darkens, the quotations become ghosts — like that of Siegfried’s Funeral March from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung — and the music seems to question the very meaning of memory, of time, of the end. There is irony, but bitter. The lyricism seems shot through with a premonition. In this final work Shostakovich does not close a circle: he leaves it open and invites us — as the title of Julian Barnes’s novel dedicated to him has it — to listen to «the noise of time».
Orchestra of Teatro Comunale di Bologna