Orchestra e Coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia - Fauré & Ravel - 02/14/26

Gabriel Fauré: Pavane in F-sharp Minor, Op. 50 

Gabriel Fauré: Requiem in D Minor, Op. 48 

Maurice Ravel: Shéhérazade, Op. 41 

Maurice Ravel: La valse 

Conductor: Alexander Soddy 

Soprano: Golda Schultz 

Baritone: Mikhail Timoshenko 

After having unexpectedly strayed from my regular schedule the previous week, it was wonderfully comforting to resume my routine with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and return to the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone last Saturday evening at 6:00 PM. And not just for any program either as last week’s line-up featured Gabriel Fauré et Maurice Ravel, two remarkable French composers who embody the relatively challenging transition from the 19th century to the 20th century with their own innovative spirits and common sense of refinement. 

So, in the end, that Valentine’s Day, which started with low skies and fierce showers, slowly but surely got better with a fabulous breakfast with friends, the consolidation of exciting travel plans, an engaging visit to the ever-interesting MAXXI museum—Never mind that the free entrance offer had brought hordes of people who stubbornly stuck around even during lunch time—before wrapping up with an early concert celebrating French culture. I could not have asked for much more.

The performance started with one of Fauré’s shortest and most beloved works in Pavane, an amuse-bouche that immediately assured us that orchestra and chorus were in excellent shape. It just as quickly demonstrated that the occupants of the entire section I was sitting in would not be able to see the screen above the stage due to the sizable smorgasbord of lighting, recording and acoustic equipment hanging from the ceiling (sigh). 

At least the frustratingly obstructed view was not an issue for Fauré’s Requiem since it is a well-known piece whose content is predictable anyway. Let’s not forget, however, that Fauré made sure to put his own personal touch to the Latin mass, which essentially consisted in taking out the dark side of death, including the terror usually felt when facing the unknown, and focus on the original meaning of the word “requiem”, which is “rest”, instead. Therefore, his after-life journey is all about eternal hope, peaceful acceptance and sweet comfort, the exquisite music bringing solace and serenity to the inevitable proceedings. 

And I must confess that not having the lyrics to follow made me appreciate the musicians and singers even more. Most particularly, the uniformly superb chorus dealt with its multi-layered parts with savviness and sensitivity, while Juilliard-trained and Berlin-based South African soprano Golda Schultz was simply extraordinary as she deftly unfolded the soaring melody of the “Pie Jesu” aria. As the performance was constantly reaching for new heights, one could easily imagine cherubic angels scattered around the auditorium attentively listening and readily approving.

After intermission, we jumped ahead a few decades and found ourselves in the mysterious world of the Far East of Ravel’s Shéhérazade, his exotic symphonic poem for voice and orchestra, featuring Schultz again. Although her contribution was much more significant in this piece, she had the vivacious orchestra to contend with this time, and consequently the whole experience of hearing her sing, while still supremely enjoyable, was less uplifting. Truth be told, as far as I am concerned, when it comes to Scheherazade, Rimski-Korsakov’s version is the one to beat, and it hasn’t happened yet. 

After leisurely basking in Ravel’s pining for far-away wonderlands, we were jolted back to reality by the overwhelming intensity of his ground-breaking La valse. Originally conceived as a ballet score and described by Ravel himself as a “choreographic poem for orchestra”, the boldly inventive tribute to the traditional waltz exuded the timeless elegance of the Old World while repeatedly getting dangerously close to the edge of the dark abyss that is the Modern World. And that’s how our French soirée ended with the resounding final blast of this thrillingly intoxicating, resolutely forward-looking wild ride.

 

Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia - Elgar & Tchaikovsky - 02/06/26

Edward Elgar: Cello Concerto in E Minor, Op. 85 

Pyotr Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64 

Conductor: Lorenzo Viotti 

Cello: Ettore Pagano 

Almost two weeks after going to the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone for a fabulous Rach 3 that still resonates in my ecstatic ears, I was back in the Sala Santa Cecilia last Friday evening at the ungodly hour of 8:00 PM instead of my usual Saturday evening 6:00 PM performance, but then, I had only myself to blame. I had been mindlessly dilly-dallying, never mind the countless advertisements about the concert all over the city and the constant sight of the three beetle-shaped concert halls from my windows, and all the reasonably priced tickets for Saturday were sold out by the time I decided to just go ahead and buy one already. 

In fact, a quick look at the rest of the Parco della Musica’s cultural season showed me that, if some potential audience members had been a bit hesitant about committing to supporting the performing arts in January, which meant that excellent seats were still available at the very last minute, they are now planning to go to whatever will be going on out there with a vengeance and buying tickets in droves accordingly, which is fantastic news for the venues and the artists, slightly less so for the procrastinators. 

As for me, I simply could not resist the perspective of hearing Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto featuring Ettore Pagano, the inordinately young, gifted and fast-rising Roman cellist who would be boldly filling in for an ailing Sheku Kanneh-Mason, or Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, both conducted by Lorenzo Viotti, the slightly-older-but-still-young Swiss-born maestro who takes eclecticism to another level by also indiscriminately dabbing in funk, jazz and death metal as a percussionist. 

There are few sounds that I find as darkly gorgeous as the ones produced by the cello, but the fact is, the cello repertoire being rather limited, the occasions to hear them outside an orchestra are unfortunately few and far between. So I was particularly grateful for the opportunity to discover a cello-centric piece I had never heard before, and not just any piece since it had been written by the esteemed early 20th-century English composer Edward Elgar, whose world-famous "Nimrod" is routinely heard in concert halls all over the world as well as during all kinds of ceremonies in England. 

And sure enough, his Cello Concerto in E Minor, Op. 85, an established staple of Late Romanticism, grabbed my attention from the very first notes, which turned out to be a poignant recitative from the solo cellist. Even after the other instruments had joined in, they all made sure to preserve intimacy and soberness while Pagano masterfully conveyed the understated yet inescapable bitter-sweetness of watching a familiar world disappear forever before one’s eyes. Clocking in at about half an hour, the concerto was not very long, but its impact was still felt after the music stopped. 

It took a certain amount of convincing, but our young prodigy eventually heeded our persistent applause and came back for a starkly beautiful Sarabande that, to me at least, even surpassed the concerto. Bravissimo! 

And then we all happily switched gears after intermission and plunged head-first into Tchaikovsky’s intensely dramatic Symphony No. 5, shamelessly relishing the privilege of basking in a voluptuous ocean of hard-core schmalz for the second half of the evening. The consistently brilliant orchestra sounded even more revved-up than usual under the particularly involved baton of maestro Viotti, who ended up having quite a breathless work-out on his stand, and delivered a thrilling account of the magnificent score. I hadn’t heard the symphony live in a long time, and that exciting performance, with its sweeping waves of passion and its quiet interludes of introspection, reminded me why I fell in love with Tchaikovsky—and by extension classical music—in the first place, and why our relationship is as burning hot as ever.