Friday, May 30th, 2025 at 8pm Maestro Cornelius Meister on the podium of the Sala Mehta – leading the Maggio Orchestra – for a new symphonic event.

The program includes music by Carl Maria von Weber, Luciano Berio and Robert Schumann.

Soloist, mezzo-soprano Monica Bacelli.

The concert will be broadcast on Rai Radio 3
 

Florence, May 27th, 2025 – The 87th Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Festival continues with a new symphonic event.

Friday, May 30th 2025, at 8pm, maestro Cornelius Meister will conduct the Maggio Orchestra: the program will feature compositions by Carl Maria von Weber, Luciano Berio, and Robert Schumann. The soloist will be mezzo-soprano Monica Bacelli, who made her debut at the Theater in the historic production of Le nozze di Figaro in the summer of 1992, conducted by Zubin Mehta and directed by Jonathan Miller.

Meister – again with Monica Bacelli and the Maggio Orchestra – will return to the spotlight in a few days in the concert for the Republic Day scheduled for June 1st, 2025 at 8:30 pm at the “Guido d’Arezzo” auditorium in Arezzo, with the same musical program on the bill.

Cornelius Meister, who made his debut at the Maggio in Ferruccio Busoni’s Faust, which was performed in February 2023, studied piano and conducting at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover. In September 2005, he became Generalmusikdirektor of Heidelberg, then the youngest general music director in Germany. More recently, he was appointed Generalmusikdirektor of the Stuttgart State Opera and the Stuttgart State Orchestra. Throughout his career, he has performed on major international stages, conducting prestigious orchestras such as the Concertgebouworkest, the BBC Philharmonic, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de l'Opéra National de Paris, the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the Filarmonica della Scala.

The show starts with the Overture to Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz. The debut of von Weber’s work in the summer of 1821 marked the birth of German national opera, whose lifeblood lay in the rich heritage of German folk tales and fables. In the overture, the opera’s main motifs are concentrated, combining dark orchestral sounds and moments of relaxed cantability to underline the eternal conflict between good and evil.

The following is the composition that gives the concert its name, namely Folk Songs by Luciano Berio, placed on the poster to pay tribute to the composer one hundred years after his birth (24 October 1925) and who passed away exactly 22 years ago on May 27th 2003, whose name is linked to the same history of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino where he was artistic director in 1984 for the 47th edition of the Festival, when he opened the doors to new musical proposals while maintaining a link with tradition.

The Folk Songs were composed in 1964 by Berio to pay homage to the vocal intelligence of Cathy Berberian, a mezzo-soprano with an incredible vocal range and at the time his wife, and are an anthology of eleven folk songs of various origins (United States, Armenia, Sicily, Sardinia, Provence, Azerbaijan) found in old records and collections of folk songs.

The concert ends with the Symphony No. 4 in D minor op. 120 signed by Robert Schumann: it was composed in 1841 in a period of extreme creativity; in the space of a few months, in fact, some important pages of Schumann's production saw the light, including the First Symphony op. 38 and, indeed, the Symphony in D minor. However, the poor success obtained at the first performance in Leipzig deterred the author from the intention of publishing the score, which was set aside and revised only ten years later. In its renewed and definitive guise, the Symphony was presented to the public again in March 1853 in Düsseldorf and then published with the opus number 120.