ARNOLD SCHOENBERG Pelleas und Melisande   

FRANZ LEHÁR Gold und Silber Waltz          

GEORGE GERSHWIN Rhapsody in Blue

production SPOLETO59 FESTIVAL DEI 2MONDI    

The famous musicians Antonio Pappano and Stefano Bollani - together for the first time - with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, will be the protagonists of the Final Concert for the 59th edition of the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, in Piazza Duomo, on Sunday, July 10th at 8pm. The program, which is very original and has a varied layout, starts with the dense and sometimes overwhelming sounds of the symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande (1903) by Arnold Schönberg, moves on to the glittering yet heartbreaking waltz Gold und Silber Waltz (1902) by Franz Lehár and closes with the explosive and arduous score - especially for the technical difficulty of the piano part - of Rhapsody in Blue (1924) by George Gershwin.

At first, the pairing of these two figures of musicians who are so distant may seem hazardous: Schönberg, the inventor of the twelve-tone technique and thus foster father of modern music and Gershwin, the brilliant author of musicals and the jazzy Rhapsody in Blue. Instead the two, after Schönberg’s arrival in the USA which  occurred in 1933, became close friends, spent much time together and never failed to pay homage to one another. There is a short film, as well as an oil portrait, made by Gershwin himself and dedicated to Schöneberg’s daily activities; while Schönberg does not fail to compile a passionate tribute to the young American composer on the occasion of his premature death. He was supportive of Gershwin, describing him as a "serious" musician whereby, for this quality, Schönberg acknowledges the American colleague’s  natural ability for creating something brand new and accomplished, expressive and original: "I do not speak here as a musical theorist, nor am I a critic, and hence I am not forced to say whether history will consider Gershwin a kind of Johann Strauss or Debussy, Offenbach or Brahms, Lehár or Puccini. But I know that he is an artist and a composer: he expressed musical ideas and they were new - as was the way in which he expressed them." And again: "His melodies are not products of a combination, nor of a mechanical union, but they are complete units and therefore could not be taken to pieces".

Perhaps because of his Jewish origin, Gershwin actively participated in the aid which Schönberg received, enabling him to leave Europe following the Nazi racial persecution. In turn, Schönberg often went to listen to Gershwin’s musical performances, once he had taken up residence in the United States. 

It is worth noting that the inventor of serial music, the Viennese Schönberg, was a man and musician who lived the musical experience of his city to the fullest. In Pelleas und Melisande, his great youthful symphonic poem which was encouraged by Richard Strauss, he still seems tied to a pompous tradition, yet at the same time he is a lover of "high" consumer music consisting of waltzes, polkas and melodies of the Strauss family for whom he produced transcripts for small ensembles. As well as for Lehar...

Here the weak links of this program are clarified with historical evidence and with equally weak plots full of considerations not only on a timeframe of the history of music which crosses the first part of the twentieth century, but also on the music itself, without barriers or labels, without styles or programs, which however brings together such diverse musicians only on the basis of its intrinsic quality.

Sir Antonio Pappano has been the Music Director of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia since 2005 and since 2002 he has been Music Director of Covent Garden in London. He previously held other prestigious positions: in 1990 he was appointed Music Director of the Norske Opera in Oslo and from 1991 to 2002 he held the same role at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaiedi Brussels.

He was born in London in 1959 of Italian parents, and studied piano, composition and conducting in the United States. Amongst the most prestigious moments of his career there are the memorable debuts at the Vienna State Opera in 1993, at the Metropolitan in New York in 1997 and at the Bayreuth Festival in 1999. Pappano has conducted many of the major orchestras of the world, including the New York Philharmonic, the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony and last April he debuted at La Scala in Milan with Les Troyens by Berlioz. In 2005 he was named "Conductor of the Year" by the Royal Philharmonic Society and won the Italian Music Critics’ Premio Abbiati for the performance of the Requiems by Brahms, Britten and Verdi carried out with the Artistic Group of the Academy of Santa Cecilia. Sir Antonio Pappano records exclusively for Warner Classics (formerly EMI Classics) and with the Orchestra and Choir of Santa Cecilia he has recorded several CDs. Among his most recent recordings there is Symphony No. 2 by Rachmaninoff, the Sixth Symphony by Mahler, the Ninth Symphony "From the New World" by Dvorák, the Petite Messe Solennelle by Rossini, the Four Sacred Pieces by Verdi, Britten´s War Requiem, the CD "Rossini Overtures", the Aida by Verdi, The Puccini Album with Jonas Kaufmann and the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Tchaikovsky and No. 2 by Prokofiev with Beatrice Rana. On April 16, 2007 Sir Antonio Pappano was named Academic member at Santa Cecilia. In 2012, he received a knighthood for his services to music from Queen Elizabeth; in the same year he was also appointed Cavaliere di Gran Croce by the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. On March 24, 2015 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in Music and Entertainment from the University of Tor Vergata in Rome.

Music as a huge game to be re-invented time after time, alone or with different partners. Bollani takes the stage to learn something every night and "because it is cheaper than paying a psychoanalyst." He is constantly searching for stimuli everywhere, in all the music of the past but above all he is exploring the present, the time being, improvising alongside great artists like his noble mentor Enrico Rava, Richard Galliano, Bill Frisell, Paul Motian, Chick Corea, Hamilton de Holanda. With the same spirit he is infiltrating within symphony orchestras such as the Leipzig Gewandhaus, La Scala in Milan and the Orchestre National being taken by the hand by brave and enthusiastic conductors such as Riccardo Chailly, Krjstian Jarvi, Daniel Harding. For the last 12 years, along with the bassist Jesper Bodilsen and drummer Morten Lund, he has been seeking how to transmit to the public, the same fun they experience whenever the voices of their instruments merge together. He celebrates the song-format alongside Caetano Veloso and Hector Zazou but also with renowned fellow countrymen like Irene Grandi, Fabio Concato, Elio e le Storie Tese. When he is not playing, he is writing books or plays such as Primo Piano, with Banda Osiris or La regina dada, written and performed with Valentina Cenni, who besides being a wonderful actress, is the woman he lives with. On the radio, thanks to the cooperation with that wizard of David Riondino, he gave life to Dr. Djembè, the all-knowing musicologist who has been spreading seeds of irony and sarcasm through the microphones of RadioRai3 for several years. On TV, after the experience at the court of Renzo Arbore, he launched himself into jam sessions of speech and music for two seasons of his Sostiene Bollani on channel Rai3. Everything is always done to communicate joy. Joy in spite of everything, like the title of his recent work for ECM says, borrowing a phrase from the great Tom Robbins. 

The Orchestra of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia was the first in Italy to devote itself exclusively to symphonic repertoires, promoting premieres of important works of the twentieth century. Since 2002 the Orchestra of Santa Cecilia, often assisted by the choir, performs in the Hall of the Santa Cecilia Auditorium Parco della Musica, designed by Renzo Piano.

The orchestra was founded in 1908 and was conducted by all the most important musical figures of the twentieth century: from Mahler, Strauss, Stravinsky, Toscanini, Mengelberg, Furtwängler, De Sabata and Karajan to the most recent Carlos Kleiber, Georg Solti, Claudio Abbado, Carlo Maria Giulini, Lorin Maazel, Georges Prêtre Wolfgang Sawallisch and Christian Thielemann. Nowadays, the Santa Cecilia complex regularly collaborates with the most prestigious performers on the international scene: from Daniel Harding to Gustavo Dudamel, from Semyon Bychkov to Yuri Temirkanov and Valery Gergiev.

Leonard Bernstein was Honorary President from 1983 to 1990. After a long partnership with Bernardino Molinari, the Music Directors of the Orchestra have been Franco Ferrara, Fernando Previtali, Igor Markevitch, Thomas Schippers, Giuseppe Sinopoli, Daniele Gatti and Myung-Whun Chung. Thanks to Maestro Antonio Pappano, Music Director since 2005, the prestige of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia has had a remarkable ascend, gaining significant international recognition. With Pappano, the Orchestra has been a guest of major festivals: Proms in London, the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg, the Lucerne Festival, the Salzburg Festival and the most prestigious concert halls, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Musikverein , the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Royal Albert Hall in London, the Salle Pleyel in Paris, La Scala in Milan, the Suntory Hall in Tokyo and the Semperoper in Dresden. In July 2013, the Orchestra and Choir of Santa Cecilia were again guests of the Proms in London performing, in concert form the Guillaume Tell, while in August 2014 the Santa Cecilia  groups, still conducted by Pappano, performed at the Salzburg Festival. Among the engagements in this last season there are concerts at La Scala in Milan and at the Lingotto in Turin, at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, at the Semperoper in Dresden and at the Musikverein in Vienna, as well as a tour in the Far East. After long collaboration with some of the most famous international labels that produced memorable testimonies, now historic, there has been very intense discography work in the last few years. In fact, recently, still under the baton of Antonio Pappano, two CDs dedicated to Tchaikovsky have been published: one with music by Lalo, Dvorák, Glazunov and Saint-Saens and another dedicated to music by Respighi. In 2008, Pappano recorded Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly which won the Gramophone Award and in 2009 the "live" Requiem by Verdi which received the BBC Music Magazine. Awards 2010 (Choral Sector), the Critics Award at the Classical Brit Awards 2010 and the Gramophone Award 2010. For the DGG, Pappano has recorded Stabat Mater by Pergolesi (with Anna Netrebko and Marianna Pizzolato). Among the latest recordings: a CD dedicated to Rachmaninoff (Symphony No. 2), the Stabat Mater and the opera William Tell by Rossini, the Sixth Symphony by Mahler, the Ninth Symphony "From the New World" and the Cello Concerto by Dvorák, Petite Messe Solennelle by Rossini, a disc devoted to Verdi’s sacred pieces, Britten´s War Requiem, the Overtures by Rossini, Verdi´s Aida, The Puccini Album with Jonas Kaufman and the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Tchaikovsky and No. 2 by Prokofiev with Beatrice Rana.