Concert conducted by Francesco Cilluffo with the participation of Edoardo Maria Strabbioli – GBOPERA
Verona, Philharmonic Theater, Symphony Season 2022.
Orchestra and Chorus of the Arena di Verona Foundation
Director Francis Cilluffo
Choir Master Ulisse Trabacchin
Piano Edward Maria Strabbioli
Igor Stravinsky: “Symphonie de Psaumes” (1948 version);
Alexander Scriabin: “Concerto in F sharp minor for piano and orchestra op. 20”;
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Suite from “Le Coq d’Or”, four musical pictures
Verona, 25 November 2022
A particularly ambitious and rarely listened to program, for the tenth and last appointment of the 2022 symphonic season of the Arena Foundation. Starting with that Symphony of Salumi commissioned from Stravinsky, by Serge Koussevitzky, director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1929, a commission that the composer chose to decline in the choral symphonic genre, avoiding the pure instrumental language of a nineteenth-century cultural heritage foreign to him. With this composition, Stravinsky wanted the two ensembles, orchestral and choral, to be placed on the same level “without any predominance of one over the other”. Having chosen some passages from Psalms 38, 39 and 150 in the Latin version, the author opts for redundant instrumental sonorities, excluding the violins and violas in favor of a powerful ensemble of woodwinds, brass, percussion, harp and any two pianos to evoke a large organ and recall the splendor of the monumental musical architecture of the Renaissance. It is a pity that Stravinskij’s original intentions were disregarded in their double expectation, one monumental and the other aimed at the search for an eternal connection between man and Creation; the choir of the Foundation, numerically disproportionate to the orchestral mass and therefore clearly inferior in sonority, he did everything possible (even going as far as forcing the sounds by screaming) to claim and affirm his own musical identity, crushed as he was by the instrumental predominance. A real pity because the choral part reveals preciousness in the musical geometries and in the contrapuntal interweaving; it would be desirable for the Fondazione Arena to pay greater attention to its vocal staff, among other things not adequately employed in the extra-lyrical repertoire in the face of a wide and varied symphonic programming. Followed by the refined and rarely listened to Concerto for piano and orchestra in F sharp minor op. 20 by Aleksandr Skrjabin, which constitutes a unicum in the production essentially dedicated to the piano alone. A youthful composition, conceived at the age of twenty-four, with which the pianist-composer wanted to present himself to the general public but inexplicably fled from the great pianists who also devoted themselves extensively to his Sonatas. With a thematic system that sometimes recalls Chopin and winks at Rachmaninov, the concert was presented at the Philharmonic by the pianist from Verona Edward Maria Strabbioli, an excellent musician particularly active in chamber music for which he has made brilliant recordings alongside the most famous instrumentalists in the world. His reading of Skrjabin enchants and fascinates. Strabbioli doesn’t play, he enchants: sitting at the piano he forms a symbiotic conjunction with the instrument that seems to come to life and sing with vibrant passion. A performance of rare beauty and enjoyment underlined by the vibrant applause of an audience that was once again generous but numerically disappointing. To conclude the rich and captivating program there was the symphonic suite from Le Coq d’Or (The Golden Rooster) by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, composer and officer of the Russian Navy, distinguished teacher (among his pupils are Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Glazunov and Respighi) proponent of musical nationalism and proud popularizer of the music of his colleagues. The last of his theatrical works, born in a tormented moment in the composer’s life and heavily censored at the time, Il Gallo d’oro is still scarcely performed today; instead, this suite in four paintings was more successful, revealing the great symphonic skill of Rimsky-Korsakov. A great timbral fresco well painted by the orchestra of the Fondazione Arena with a perfect and singular balance between its sections, in particular the strings with a clean and generous sound. Francis Cilluffo, a talented young conductor, gave a passionate and vigorous interpretation of this suite, confirming a precise symphonic intention already seen in favoring Skrjabin’s pianism. Instead, a little more cautious with Stravinskij but here the impression given was of a constant and concerned search aimed at compensating and balancing the phonic imbalance between choir and orchestra. A good concert, therefore, where once again the absence of the general public was noted; even if the road is long and tortuous, it is the only one to take to escape a worn-out programming stuffed with the usual names (Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn). The general public, one must come to terms with it, must be educated in beauty in order to discover that beyond the mountain there is much more. Photo Ennevi for the Arena Foundation