Michele Mariotti returns to conduct in Bologna on 17 June

BOLOGNA, 14 JUN – After having stood on the podium of the Orchestra of the Teatro Comunale of Bologna from 2007 to 2018, the last five years as musical director, Michele Mariotti returns to conduct under the Two Towers, Monday 17 June at 8.30 pm at the Manzoni Auditorium , however at the helm of the Filarmonica del Teatro Comunale, which is a direct emanation of the other team. When he arrived at the Comunale Mariotti was a young conductor, 28 years old, who grew up together with the Orchestra of Piazza Verdi, which since 1987 has been the orchestra of the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Mariotti’s city. For his long-awaited return to the Manzoni, Michele Mariotti has chosen a well-known program which fits between that little orchestral jewel that is Jean Sibelius’s Valse Sad and Franz Schubert’s last Symphony, “The Great”, a page that releases freshness like the Concerto No. 2 for piano and orchestra in F major, which Dmitrij Shostakovich created for his nineteen-year-old son Maksim. In Bologna he will be played by a pianist almost the same age as the dedicatee: the twenty-year-old Russian-Armenian Eva Gevorgyan, winner of over forty piano competitions. Eva Gevorgyan debuts in the Bolognese season together with the man who has now become the musical director of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma. Also much loved by Leonard Bernstein, who gave its first American performance in the dual role of soloist and conductor in New York, Shostakovich’s Second Concerto was inaugurated by the composer’s son in Moscow in 1957. Sibelius wrote Valse Sad for the music of the Symbolist drama Kuolema (“Death”) by brother-in-law Arvid Järnefelt, but became famous as a concert piece in its own right after the success of the first performance in 1904. Schubert’s Symphony No. 9, however, was performed for the first performed at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig in 1839 with Felix Mendelssohn conducting. Composed between 1825 and 1828, “La grande” had a troubled genesis and was rejected by the orchestra of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. (HANDLE).