Luciano Acocella: 26th September 2024, Zubin Mehta hall

Maestro Luciano Acocella, making his Maggio debut, with a program of compositions by Maurice Ravel, Pëtr Il’ič Čajkovskij and Modest Musorgskij.

Soloist on piano Giuseppe Albanese in one of Pëtr Il’ič Čajkovskij's best-known compositions: the Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Major Op. 23 for Piano and Orchestra.

Florence, 25th September 2024 – Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024, at 8 p.m., in the Zubin Mehta Hall, the third symphony concert of the Maggio's Fall Season: on the podium, in his Maggio debut, maestro Luciano Acocella conducting the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Orchestra. Soloist at the piano in the performance of Čajkovskij's Concerto No. 1 is Giuseppe Albanese.

Opening with a composition with fairy-tale overtones, Maurice Ravel's Ma mère l'oye. Hypothesized as a gift to the children of two of his friends, the musician was inspired by some famous French fairy tales by Charles Perrault, Madame d'Aulnoy and Madame Leprince de Beaumont such as “Sleeping Beauty,” “Thumbling” or “Beauty and the Beast”: simplicity of means, transparency in instrumentation and unquestionable stylistic refinement are the ingredients with which Ravel realizes this delightful fairy tale picture.

This is followed by one of Pëtr Il’ič Čajkovskij's best-known and most popular compositions: the Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 23. Composed between 1874 and 1875, except for returning to it twice more to give a final version in 1889, it has entered the common imagination as an emblem of the late Romantic concerto characterized by melodies of great expressiveness and sentimentality.

The piano is undoubtedly the absolute protagonist with highly virtuosic writing. Closing the concert are Modest Mussorgskij's famous Pictures of an Exhibition. Composed in 1874, in memory of his friend Viktor Hartmann (painter and architect), they were originally born as a piano cycle, which would later be orchestrated in 1922 by Maurice Ravel. In the Pictures, the composer describes an imaginary walk through the halls of the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts where Hartmann's paintings were displayed after his death. There are ten paintings reproposed in as many musical panels interspersed with a promenade-an interlude with an ever-changing character-in which the composer's visionary creativity returns multiple images. Well known in popular culture, they have often been the subject of quotations in films such as “Il secondo tragico Fantozzi” (in which the promenade serves as a soundtrack to the very famous sequence of La corazzata Potëmkin, reconstructed specifically for that film) or The big Lebwoski or even of a reinterpretation in progressive rock by Emerson, Lake & Palmer (with an album, bearing the same name as the composition, that alternates between songs by Musorgskij and unreleased ones by the band).