It will be the baton of Juanjo Mena, conducting the Teatro La Fenice Orchestra, to close the 2023-2024 Symphonic Season of the Fondazione Teatro La Fenice. In the last concert on the bill, the Spanish maestro will perform the virtuosic Rach3, the Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor op. 30 by Sergei Rachmaninov, which will be played in the solo part by Nicolò Cafaro, winner of the 38th Venice Prize, and the Concerto for Orchestra by Witold Lutosławski. Of the three replicas of the concert, the first on Friday 18 October at 8.00 p.m. (shift S) will be broadcast live on Rai Radio3; the replica on Saturday 19 October at 8.00 p.m. outside the subscription will be open to the entire public while the one on Sunday 20 October at 5.00 p.m. – already sold out – is reserved for students under 35 from Esu Venezia and Padova, who will be able to access it with a super-cheap ticket price of € 10, thanks to the promotion La Fenice è giovane. The concert is realised in collaboration with McArthur Glen Designer Outlet and Bellussi Spumanti and with the support of ESU Venice and Padua. Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943) composed the Piano Concerto No. 3 in the summer of 1909, during his stay in the countryside at his family’s estate in lvanovka, not far from Moscow. He thought of this creation as a kind of calling card for his upcoming tour of the United States. In fact, he performed it for the first time in public at the Metropolitan on 28 November 1909, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch, and two months later at Carnegie Hall, with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Gustav Mahler. The reception, at first, was not enthusiastic, due to the long duration of the piece (45 minutes), the unusual formal structure and the tormented character. The extreme difficulty of the solo part – the concerto was dedicated to the pianist Józef Hofmann, one of the greatest virtuosos of the time, who, however, never played it in public – was also an obstacle to its initial dissemination. The Concerto for Orchestra by Witold Lutosławski (1913-1994) was commissioned in 1950 by Witold Rowicki, conductor of the Warsaw Philharmonic, who proposed to the Warsaw composer to write a piece for orchestra with a brilliant character, to celebrate the revival of that orchestra after the devastation of the German occupation. Lutosławski was thus able to graft fragments of the Polish folkloric repertoire into an important piece for orchestra, which he worked on very slowly, as was his custom, for about four years. Thus was born the Concerto, conducted on 26 November 1954 by Rowicki himself, and immediately received with great success (with the awarding of the State Prize), even though the composer always considered it a “marginal work” in his production, which he then turned to the search for new harmonic techniques and new formal structures.
