Tuesday, May 13th at 8:00 pm, in the Sala Orchestra of the Theater, a new appointment for the “Maggio Aperto” concerts series.

The protagonists of the evening are mezzo-soprano Marina Comparato and, on the piano, Gianni Fabbrini.

The program features a rich selection of music by Luigi Gordigiani and Franz Schubert.

Florence, May 12th, 2025 – The Maggio Aperto program continues, the series of events included in the Maggio Festival until it reaches the threshold of the summer season of the Theater.

Tuesday, May 13th at 8:00 pm, in the Sala Orchestra of the Theater, “In riva all'Arno”, the concert dedicated to the composer Luigi Gordigiani, with mezzo-soprano Marina Comparato and, on the piano, Gianni Fabbrini.

The program includes a substantial selection of music by the Florentine composer Luigi Gordigiani – often known as “the Italian Schubert” – and Franz Schubert. Gordigiani was so nicknamed because, like the authentic Viennese Schubert, his creativity was expressed abundantly in songs for voice and piano, and this gave him international fame at a time when Italian music produced only melodramas. Luigi Gordigiani (1806-1860), a leading figure in the Florence of the Risorgimento, was part of a family of musicians and artists: his father Antonio and his brother Giovanni Battista sang as a baritone, his wife Anna was the daughter of the guitar virtuoso Mauro Giuliani and one of his eight children made a name for himself as a painter and fathered a pianist. Gordigiani tried his hand at opera but success did not smile upon him, quite the opposite, so he turned to composing vocal chamber music. Gordigiani will link his wide popularity that reached all of Europe to the salon romance. Gordigiani was the author of over 300 compositions published in albums by the major publishers of the time and translated into French, German, English, Russian and Polish. His compositional vein manifested itself with a great variety of forms that go from the pathetic, to the comic, to the ironic, to the romantic and this diversity of intonations earned him, precisely, the nickname of Italian Schubert.

Speaking about the evening starring Marina Comparato, who will return to the Theatre in a few days for the performances of Der junge Lord, she explained how this concert was born, underlining how the evening is a preview of the album recorded by her and Gianni Fabbrini a few months ago at the Teatro del Maggio: "This concert was born from the recording of a CD that Gianni Fabbrini and I made at the Maggio in recent months and anticipates its release. The project has captured all my attention and having the opportunity to present it on such an important occasion as a concert included in the Festival program makes me particularly happy and fulfilled.

It is a collection of chamber melodies by the 19th-century Florentine composer Luigi Gordigiani, who was very famous at the time, so much so that his contemporaries nicknamed him "The Italian Schubert". In the concert I will sing some of his pieces and some by Schubert precisely to place one alongside the other also because in the research work that Fabbrini and I had done, we found in the Library of the Conservatory of Florence, an interesting nineteenth-century collection of Schubert's Lieder translated into Italian, something rather curious nowadays, but very widespread at the time and which underlines the "closeness" of the two composers".