An exceptional program. Which in the Mozart concert will see the young Simone Nicoletta emerge. A work that the composer, exploiting the timbral and expressive potential of the clarinet like never before, wrote for perhaps the best clarinettist of that period, Anton Stadler, musician of the imperial orchestra in Vienna. As the catalog number K 622 suggests, it is one of his last scores, he completed it in early October 1791: he would die within two months. In reality, the original version included a so-called “bassetto” clarinet, more extended towards the low range, which Stadler himself had contributed to designing, but which then did not have the hoped-for success, so much so that the Concerto would have been published in 1801 in the version with which we are all used to it, for traditional clarinet. However, as Gregorio Moppi writes in the notes, «with any type of instrument presented, the K 622 sounds of metaphysical sweetness, so clear, ethereal, soft, flowing, measured in its sounds and shapes». About a quarter of a century passes: Franz Schubert, still in Vienna, under the spell exerted by the music of Gioachino Rossini and in particular of his Tancredi, composes two Overtures “in Italian style”, according to the typical structure of the orchestral pages with which Rossini opened his works – slow introduction and an Allegro, a geometry which Schubert however remodels according to the Viennese instrumental spirit. Muti’s choice this evening falls on the second, the one in C major D 591, which, like many of Schubert’s works, remained silent for many years after the composer’s death, until its publication in 1865. The symphonic sketch composed is undoubtedly Italian in 1878 by Alfredo Catalani, Contemplazione: although its author stood out from the first rehearsals for his Wagnerian influences, as well as for his attention to the European instrumental world, his cantability is not lacking and the piece – the manuscript of which was found only in 1982 – a nostalgic, highly expressive motif appears constructed. Finally, European and cosmopolitan is the creative ideal of Ferruccio Busoni, who in 1905 elaborated the music for a Turandot (based on the same eighteenth-century fairy tale by Carlo Gozzi which Puccini would later also use) which he soon reworked in concert form in this Suite which Mahler also had the opportunity to conduct, in 1910 in New York. Of the eight paintings that compose it, Riccardo Muti will direct four: the first, The capital execution, the city gate, the farewell; the second, Truffaldino; the seventh Nocturnal Waltz; and the last In funeral march mode and Finale alla turca.
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