With You,
Armenia
GIUSEPPE PENNISI was present when
La Scala Philharmonic Orchestra visited Rome
La Scala Philharmonic Orchestra visited Rome
September is a peculiar musical
month in Italy. The major music festivals have concluded their activities and
the Fall/Winter 'seasons' are yet to begin. However, two important festivals take place: a festival in
Milan together with Turin, called MiTo and one in Rimini. At
these festivals, international orchestras offer their repertory, but there is also a great deal of
innovation. As for Rome, Teatro dell'Opera starts its Fall season early with a John Adams opera, and the Accademia Nazionale di
Santa Cecilia, with a
'season' starting on 3 October — hosts three orchestras which seldom visit
Italy's capital: La Scala Philharmonic Orchestra, the
Orquesta Juvanil Universitaria Eduardo Mata de Mexico and the Quatar Philharmonic
Orchestra. I attended the first of the three concerts on 5 September 2015 featuring La Scala Philharmonic
Orchestra but I will be abroad when the other two orchestras visit Rome.
The La Scala Philharmonic Orchestra concert, conducted by Daniel Harding and with the young upcoming star Alessandro Taverna at the piano, is part of a much wider and deeper
international project, named With you, Armenia. The project is a memorial of the 1915 Armenian genocide. It started last March in Jerusalem and, after Rome, has very important
appointments: in New York at the Carnegie Hall with Evgeny Kissin and Krzysztof Penderecki, in London with the Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra and Pinchas
Zukerman, in Brussels with the Belgian National Orchestra and in Vienna at the Musikverein. The project is
meant to sensitize audiences to the Armenian genocide (which
risks being forgotten) through music and musicians of world repute, in order to attract the attention of people and the media.
Only a limited number of Armenian composers are widely known worldwide — Aram Khachaturian and a few others belong to the Soviet era and are best known for their ballet music. Thus, With you, Armenia
mostly offers Western symphonic music, with which audiences are quite familiar.
The first part of the 5 September
concert included Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor Op 37 with the
young but already internationally known Alessandro Taverna, considered by many
music critics as the natural successor to Arturo Benedetti
Michelangeli. The
Concerto (premiered in Vienna in 1803) is one of Beethoven's most popular compositions for piano and orchestra, with an
unusually large part for the pianist. Also, Harding and Taverna rightly
emphasized the dramatic aspects of the first movement in C;
the second movement is in E to provide a lyric, almost tender, atmosphere before a section in G where the
pianist deals with virtuoso arabesque in his dialogue with the orchestra, mostly
woodwinds. Following accolades and ovation at the end, Taverna played an encore.
 Alessandro Taverna, Daniel Harding and members of La Scala Philharmonic Orchestra in Rome. Photo © 2015 Musacchio & Ianniello. Click on the image for higher resolution |
The second part was almost entirely
taken by Dvořák's Symphony No 8 in G major, Op 88, another
very popular piece, and designed to express the marvel of man in front of nature, with recall to popular music and folk songs in the traditional four movements. Harding and the La
Scala Philharmonic Orchestra handled this very well.
 Daniel Harding and La Scala Philharmonic Orchestra in Rome. Photo © 2015 Musacchio & Ianniello. Click on the image for higher resolution |
Finally, we heard a sample of
Armenian music: Aram Khachaturian's Waltz from the Masquerade Suite: a concise but overwhelming and
exciting piece where Harding and the orchestra emphasized the dissonances.
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