Thursday, May 8th at 8 pm - in Sala Zubin Mehta - maestro Michele Mariotti returns to lead the Orchestra and Chorus of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.

The program includes music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Igor Stravinskij and Francis Poulenc.

Soloists in Poulenc's Gloria are soprano Emőke Baráth and tenor Luca Tamani.

The concert will be broadcast on Rai Radio 3
 

Florence, May 6th, 2025 – The symphonic events continue as part of the 87th edition of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Festival.

On Thursday, May 8th at 8 p.m., in Sala Mehta, Maestro Michele Mariotti returns to conduct the Maggio Orchestra and Choir, almost 10 years after his last engagement in Florence. The maestro of the Maggio Choir is Lorenzo Fratini.

The concert opens with the Symphony in G minor K. 183 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, which the genius from Salzburg composed in the autumn of 1773. This symphony is also known as the Little Symphony, to distinguish it from the Great Symphony K. 550 (in the same key): it is said to have been written in just two days, although it is likely that Mozart was composing several works at the same time and this would explain the two-day difference between the date with which it is signed and the previous Symphony K. 182. This is followed by one of Igor Stravinskij's most beloved compositions, Jeu de cartes: in 1935, while he was in the United States, Stravinskij received an invitation from Edward Warburg and Lincoln Kirstein to write a score for the recently formed American Ballet. The musician decided to create a ballet on the theme of gambling because he had always been attracted by gambling since his childhood and often remembered the impression left on him by a holiday in a German spa resort, its casino and its players.

The concert closes with the Gloria in G major for soprano, chorus and orchestra by Francis Poulenc. It was performed for the first time in Boston in January 1961, conducted by Charles Münch and with soprano Adele Addison as soloist, and was an immediate success, even though Poulenc was the target of some criticism for his “unprejudiced” way of treating sacred material. On the stage of the Mehta Hall, in the performance of the Gloria, Emőke Baráth, soprano, making her debut on the Florentine stage, and Luca Tamani, tenor and artist of the Maggio Chorus. 

Maestro Mariotti, who made his debut at the Maggio with Snow White by Luigi Zaninelli in the spring of 2006, graduated in composition at the Rossini Conservatory in his hometown, Pesaro, where he studied conducting under the guidance of Manlio Benzi. At the same time, he graduated in conducting at the Accademia Musicale Pescarese with Donato Renzetti. Awarded the 36th Abbiati Prize as Best Conductor, he has been a guest at major Italian and international theaters and festivals, including La Scala in Milan, the Paris Opera, the Wiener Staatsoper, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, the Salzburg Festival and the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro. Since 2008, he has been Principal Conductor and then Music Director of the Comunale di Bologna, a theater where he has conducted numerous symphonic concerts and dozens of opera productions, including La bohème directed by Graham Vick, which won the “Franco Abbiati” music critics’ award as best show of 2018.

The concert:

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Symphony in G minor K. 183

Mozart composed the Symphony in G minor K. 183 in 1773 at the age of seventeen. Many commentators consider it the Symphony of his turning point, the first of many masterpieces in the genre that would be written by the talented musician from Salzburg from then on. Mozart had spent the summer of that year in Vienna, where he had the opportunity to get to know Haydn's symphonies in minor keys, and was greatly impressed. Upon his return to Salzburg, he decided to put his new knowledge to good use by composing the Symphony in G minor, whose impetuous and passionate character clearly distinguishes it from the other symphonies composed in that period. The Symphony K. 183 is divided into four movements linked by an intense and melancholic expressiveness. From the first bars of the Allegro con brio, one perceives a climate full of pathos that does not fade in the following Andante, also animated by melodic restlessness. The Minuet, again in G minor, offers a joyful moment only in the Trio (in G major) entrusted to the wind instruments alone, while the final Allegro brings back to the fore the fiery energy and abrupt dynamic contrasts already present in the first movement.

Igor Stravinskij
Jeu de cartes

Jeu de cartes, “Ballet in Three Hands” by Igor Stravinskij was composed in 1936 at the request of the choreographer and impresario Lincoln Kirstein for the American Ballet and premiered on April 27, 1937 in New York with choreography by George Balanchine. The action of the ballet describes a game of poker, one of Stravinsky's favorite games, during which the mischievous joker, who considers himself invincible due to his chameleon-like ability to transform himself into any card, dominates the game in the first two hands; but in the third and final hand he is unexpectedly defeated by a royal flush of hearts. A work of detachment, 'Jeu de cartes' represents for Stravinsky the pure essence of musical divertissement that allows him to play freely with musical materials from the past to be broken down and then assembled with irony and rhythmic virtuosity into a colorful sound puzzle. Viennese waltzes and galops, echoes of Tchaikovsky, fairground music, the obvious quotation of Rossini's symphony from The Barber of Seville, are just some of the heterogeneous elements that are bent by the Russian composer's imagination into a brilliant work with an overwhelming rhythmic charm.

Francis Poulenc
Gloria in G major for soprano, chorus and orchestra

In 1959, the Koussevitzky Foundation approached Francis Poulenc to write a symphony in honor of Sergei Koussevitzky and his wife Natalia. However, the French composer replied that a symphony was not his genre, and was therefore given the freedom to choose the piece to compose. Thus was born the Gloria for soprano, chorus and orchestra, which was completed in 1960 and performed for the first time in Boston in January of the following year. The liturgical text of the Gloria, taken from the mass, takes on a joyful and light-hearted air in Poulenc's work that made many turn up their noses. To those who criticized the excessive unscrupulousness of the Gloria, Poulenc replied that in composing it he had thought of Gozzoli's frescoes in which angels stick out their tongues and also of the serious Benedictine monks he once saw playing football, underlining that sense of humor that shines through in all his production, even in his sacred works. Divided into six sections, the Gloria alternates moments of poignant prayer (in the sections where the soprano's voice is used) with vocal explosions of joyful exultation. The strong contrasts that characterize Poulenc's style are expressed in the harmonic language of this work, which juxtaposes sharp dissonances with sumptuous and sinuous chords, in the dynamics, in the alternation of subdued singing and emphatic choral intonations; elements used skillfully to express a wide range of emotions, from lyrical serenity to the most shameless joy.