As part of the 86th Maggio Festival, on Friday, June 7th 2024 at 8pm, maestro Daniele Gatti will be on the podium of the Sala Mehta for a choral symphony concert.

On the program are “Psalm IX” by Goffredo Petrassi and the “Symphony n. 5” by Dmitrij Šostakovič.

The concert will be broadcast deferred on Rai Radio 3
 

Florence, 4 June 2024 – The principal conductor Daniele Gatti – who’s conducting on 6 and then 8 June the last two performances of Tosca - takes to the podium in the Mehta Hall leading the Maggio Orchestra and Choir, on Friday ,June 7th at 8pm, for a choral symphony concert with a programme characterised by a marked religious imprint and in line with the program of the inaugural concert on April 13th, which proposed the Psalm 13 by Alexander Zemlinsky and with that of the concert on May 5th, with another music piece by Goffredo Petrassi, the Magnificat.

Yet opening the concert on June 7th another composition by Goffredo Petrassi, the Psalm IX, a large work for choir, string orchestra, brass, percussion and two pianos in which Petrassi skillfully brings together the lessons of the great polyphonists of the passed with the musical innovations of his time. The writing of the Psalm begun in October 1934 and finished two years later.

The master of the Coro del Maggio is Lorenzo Fratini.

As with the concert on May 5th, the concert closes with a composition by Dmitrij Šostakovič; on this occasion the Symphony n. 5 in D minor op. 47, one of the most emblematic and painful compositions that the St. Petersburg composer composed between April 1937 and July of the same year; a dark period in which Stalin's repressions were strong, even on what was the artistic, cultural and musical life of the country. Šostakovič himself was harshly criticized for the style of his A Lady Macbeth of the Mcensk District and therefore the essence of his Fifth Symphony is closely linked to his emotions of those very complex years: a musical page in which the catastrophe is disguised as triumph, and where the loudest dissent is mistaken for consensus to ears incapable of listening.

Before the concert, a presentation of the program is offered to the public: the guide is held in the Foyer of the Zubin Mehta Hall approximately 45 minutes before the start of the concert. 

The program:

Goffredo Petrassi
Psalm IX for choir and orchestra

Composer and teacher born in 1904, Goffredo Petrassi was one of the most authoritative personalities on the Italian musical scene of the second half of the 20th century. Raised musically among the ranks of the pueri cantores of the Church of San Salvatore in Lauro in Rome, Petrassi had the opportunity to know and study the works of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque, which left a lasting impression on him. After his debut in the instrumental field under the sign of the neoclassical current, the composer tries his hand at a series of wide-ranging choral works, including Psalm IX, in which he skilfully brings together the lessons of the great polyphonists of the past with the musical innovations of the time of him. Composed in 1934, Psalm IX is a large work for choir, string orchestra, brass, percussion and two pianos. Equally influenced by the Stravinsky model of the Symphony of Psalms and by the baroque choral tradition, the piece stands out for its large polyphonic architectures in which dry, sometimes angular sounds dominate, accompanied by incisive rhythms.The first performance was conducted in December 1936, in Turin, by Vittorio Gui.

Dmitrij Šostakovič
Symphony no. 5 in D minor op. 47

In 1937 Dmitrij Šostakovič signed the Symphony no. 5, one of his most emblematic and painful compositions. The previous year he had been harshly attacked in the columns of «Pravda» and the article accusing him of 'formalism', i.e. the author of bourgeois art that was the enemy of the people, had put his career and his very life in danger. In that period, Sostakovič had just completed the experimental and complex Fourth Symphony but decided not to have it performed and to lock it in a drawer, waiting for better times. As a replacement he composed the Fifth, a work strangely appreciated by the regime which does not recognize the composer's act of denunciation behind the few hints of musical triumphalism. The ambiguous subtitle, 'Practical response of a composer to a fair criticism', initially suggested a surrender by the artist in the face of the thrust inflicted on him by Stalin's regime but in the four movements of the Fifth, Šostakovič, in reality, does not adopt a rhetorical language nor popular. Years later, he himself would clarify how the jubilation found in the Fifth was only a façade, yet another tragic mask worn to give vent to one's creativity in times dominated by fear and terror.