The Festival dei Due Mondi closes on the notes of Mahler with the Orchestra of 'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and Antonio Pappano

Spoleto, July 8, 2023 - As always, there is great anticipation for the final concert of the 66th Festival dei Due Mondi: the appointment, sold out from weeks, is at Piazza Duomo tomorrow, July 9, at at 7:30 p.m. with Antonio Pappano conducting the Orchestra of theAccademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. to Spoleto Pappano conducts his orchestra for the last time after eighteen years together, before leaving Rome for London where he will take over as conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. The program is all dedicated to Gustav Mahler, a composer perhaps more than any other capable of making us share in the immensity of the natural world around us in his music. Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke performs the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen(Songs of a Young Man on a Journey) for voice and orchestra, followed by the Symphony No. 1 in D major Titan. "We chose these pieces because there is a thread that binds them: the songs contain the themes later developed in the symphony," Pappano explains. In writing the four Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Symphony No. 1 Mahler realized the importance to him of the relationship between man and nature. His Nature is both ecstatic and terrifying; it is a labyrinth resonating with secret voices in which the human soul is mirrored in all its unknowability. Of the Lieder Mahler also wrote the text: a young man begins to walking, not knowing what he is looking for, driven only from an inner torment. The nature around him is the only possible interlocutor for his resigned sorrow; we hear it respond in the call of the cuckoo, the greeting of the chaffinch and the bellflower, given voice by the instruments of the orchestra. The Symphony continues the journey undertaken with the Lieder, to the point from borrowing some of their melodies. The first movement, which in one version bore the title "Endless Spring," opens with the voices of nature. "With the first sound," Mahier told violist Natalie Bauer-Lechner, the long "A" of the strings with harmonics, "we are in the midst of nature: in the forest, where the summer sunlight sparkles, flickering among the branches. In this forest we remain enchanted to watching the unfolding of the whole Symphony. to a certain point from far away we see a fantastic procession approaching: hares, foxes, deer and roe deer dance escorting in their midst to the body of a dead hunter. It seems that it was Moritz von Schwind's engraving "Funeral of the Hunter," a popular illustration from German childhood literature, to that gave to Mahler the idea for the March in the third movement. The double basses intone the melody of "Fra martino" - made funereal and grotesque by the change of key - to accompany the journey of these animals, some happy and some sad, almost human.