Maestro Daniele Gatti on the podium of the Sala Grande for the fourth symphonic appointment of the Carnival Festival on Saturday 25 February at 20: on the bill is a program entirely dedicated to the compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven.

Piano soloist, Rudolf Buchbinder.

Florence, 23 March 2023 – After the applauded performances of Don Carlo, the final work of the Autumn Festival, maestro Daniele Gatti on the podium of the Main hall on Saturday 25 February at 8 pm for his first symphonic appointment as part of the Carnival Festival of Maggio. A program entirely dedicated to the compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven on the lecterns of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Orchestra: opening the Concerto in G major Op. 58 for piano and orchestra, performed by the composer himself at the Theater an der Wien in December 1808, in what was his last public performance as a pianist. On the stage next to Maestro Gatti’s podium, Rudolf Buchbinder: the great Austrian pianist returns to the Teatro del Maggio after the concert, recorded, held with Zubin Mehta in March 2021. For Maestro Buchbinder, Saturday marks the tenth performance in May starting from its debut, which took place in October 1977 under the direction of Vladimir Delman.

The concert closes with Symphony No. 4 in B flat major op. 60, composed after the summer of 1806 and leaner and more ‘agile’ than its titanic sisters, i.e. the famous Third and Fifth symphonies.

So, just under two years later, the great pianist Rudolf Buchbinder is back: one of the best known and most acclaimed living performers, during his long career he performed the complete Beethoven piano Sonatas more than 60 times throughout the world and for decades his interpretations of Beethoven’s works have been a role model of enormous importance. In autumn 2021 he recorded for the “Deutsche Grammophon” the CD Buchbinder: Beethoven which collects the 32 Sonatas and 5 Concerts. He was the first pianist to perform the complete Sonatas at the Salzburg Festival in 2014, recorded on DVD and collected on 9 CDs; on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Vienna Musikverein, he performed, as the only pianist in the history of the famous hall, Beethoven’s 5 Concertos in a special series dedicated to him together with the Lispia Gewandhaus Orchestra with Andris Nelsons, the Wiener Philharmoniker with Riccardo Muti and the Bayerischer Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra, the Münchner Philharmoniker and the Sächsische Staatskapelle of Dresden with their respective permanent conductors Mariss Jansons, Valery Gergiev and Christian Thielemann. All concerts, recorded live and released in September 2021 on 3 CDs, constitute a milestone of Beethovenian interpretation. Buchbinder is an honorary member of the Wiener Philharmoniker, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Vienna, the Wiener Konzerthausgesellschaft, the Wiener Symphoniker and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and was the first soloist to be awarded the Gold Medal of the Sächsische Staatskapelle in Dresden. He has also been artistic director of the Grafenegg Festival since 2007, the year of its foundation.

Following the move from the Sala Mehta to the Sala Grande, the Teatro del Maggio informs the public about admissions to the theatre:

Season ticket holders who have subscribed to the stalls will be able to take a seat in the seat they usually occupy in the Sala Grande. Season ticket holders with a seat in the Gallery will be able to occupy their seat in the Sala Grande in the same way, but they will be offered the option of sitting in the stalls in a new seat already assigned to them. Anyone wishing to take advantage of this opportunity will simply have to collect the new ticket at the ticket office. Single ticket holders will be able to access the Hall by withdrawing in advance to collect the new assignment.

The new seats are already available at the ticket office.

Programme:

Ludwig van Beethoven
Concerto in G major Op. 58 for piano and orchestra
On December 22, 1808 Beethoven performed for the last time in public as a pianist. He did so by giving the audience of the Theater an der Wien the Concerto No. 4 for piano and orchestra Op. 58, presented in an evening with a very rich program which also included the Fifth and Sixth Symphony. Composed between 1803 and 1806, the Concerto n. 4 shows a different character from the three preceding it. For example, there is no antagonistic relationship between soloist and orchestra but the piano is instead perfectly integrated into the orchestral texture; the decisive and vigorous tones that characterize so much production of Beethoven’s second period give way here to a chiaroscuro atmosphere with a wide range of nuances, and so also the thematic baggage is no longer treated in antithetical terms but developed freely as in a fantasy . Contrary to tradition, the initial Allegro opens with a first lyrical and intimate theme played by the piano and then taken up by the orchestra, followed by a second energetic theme. The Andante is a page as short as it is intense where two contrasting thematic ideas appear, the first austere entrusted to the orchestra and the second melancholic exposed almost softly by the piano; while the Rondo finale, full of brilliance, dissolves any previous tension by leading the dialogue between piano and orchestra at a light pace.

Symphony No. 4 in B flat major Op. 60
Born as a diversion, the Symphony No. 4 in B flat major Op. 60 had a strange fate as it was forced to live in the shadow of the Third – which precedes it slightly – and the Fifth, composed instead in the same period. In the summer of 1806, Count Franz von Oppersdorf had commissioned a symphony from Beethoven. At the time the musician was working on the first movements of the Symphony in C minor (the future Fifth), which he initially thought of allocating to the count. However, the processing of the Fifth took longer than expected and so Beethoven preferred to compose a new work from scratch, i.e. Symphony No. 4. Compared to the titanic sisters, the Fourth, composed almost in one go, shows decidedly disengaged features and a more agile and streamlined structure. After the efforts made in the most emblematic pages of his second period, the Fourth represents for Beethoven the right and necessary relaxing break. It is no coincidence that Robert Schumann defined her as “a slender Greek girl between two Nordic giants”. An apt comparison if we think of the monumentality of the Terza or the belligerent energy of the Fifth. In the fourth a Beethoven with a momentarily appeased soul emerges, ready to retrace the already trodden paths of the eighteenth-century classical form with a first movement opened by a slow introduction, according to Haydn’s model, followed by a second movement Adagio with elegiac tones, a graceful Minuet with Trio and a final Allegro full of panache.