The curtain falls on the 86th edition of the Maggio Fiorentino Festival: three months of intense opera and symphonic programming, a wealth of satisfaction and the certainty of a restart after the crisis, thanks also to the passionate demonstration of trust given by a large audience who sold out for most of the shows. And the last concert is also sold out, tonight at 8pm.
It will be Zubin Mehta, conductor emeritus for life, after the triumph of a Turandot which has once again shone in its luminous career, to stand on the podium of the room dedicated to him at the helm of the Orchestra and Choir of the Maggio, a few days after the two prestigious tours in which he is the protagonist, in China at the end of June and at the Ljubljana Festival in July.
Alongside him, in the interpretation of Chopin’s Concerto n.2 op.21, will be the pianist Alexander Gadjiev: not yet thirty years old, a solid family legacy, a Central European education. Born in Gorizia to a family of musicians (his father, of Russian origin, is a well-known teacher), he rose to international prominence for placing second in the 2021 edition of the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, where he also won the special ‘Krystian Zimerman’ for the best performance of a sonata. He had previously won the Hamamatsu Competition in Japan in 2015, the Montecarlo World Piano Masters in 2018, the Sydney International Competition in 2021 and the 42nd Abbiati Prize as best soloist for the year 2022. In his absolute debut at the Teatro del May, Gadjiev plays a unique and precious instrument: a Shigeru Kawai SK-EX piano with carbon mechanics, entirely handmade
Opening the evening, the gothic ballad ‘Der Feuerreiter? by Hugo Wolf from 1892, which is inspired by a poem by Eduard Mörike. The song narrates the crazy race of a mysterious fire knight called to put out the fire in a mill where he will meet his death. The concert closes with Dvorák’s Symphony n.7 op.70, with typically Slavic features and an austere and balanced character, composed at the time of the first international successes of the Bohemian master and commissioned by the London Philharmonic Society in the wake of the successes obtained during a series of concerts in the English capital in 1884. The concert will be broadcast live on Rai Radio 3.
