Riccardo Muti and Cherubini cross Italy

Riccardo Muti and his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra renew their commitment to Italian music and theaters, helping to keep their doors virtually open with the tour organized by Ravenna Festival: crossing the peninsula from north to south

, the concerts recorded in

will be in free streaming respectively from

. The appointment at Donizetti is a gift from BPER Banca to the city and the concert, scheduled for the Don Pasquale Symphony and Beethoven's Eroica, will be broadcast on the BPER Banca website. In the Neapolitan city, where Muti and Cherubini will perform the Symphony from I due Figaro by

and the Symphony n. 9 by Schubert, the event was instead made possible by the collaboration with Napoli Teatro Festival, which will host it on its official website. Finally, the web TV of the

in Palermo will broadcast the Symphony n. 3 by Schubert and the Symphony "From the New World" by Dvořák. In collaboration with RMMUSIC, the three concerts will remain available for 30 days from the first broadcast date; they will also be accessible

, and on ravennafestival.live.

was chosen

: a message of rebirth for the city, one year after the first lockdown, and a sign of attention by BPER Banca for one of the territories that have suffered most. Just at the Donizetti Theater, in 2016, Riccardo Muti had celebrated fifty years of career with the Symphony of Don Pasquale, "because I want to leave you all with a sense of hope, a smile and a laugh" he explained on that occasion; a desire that now seems even more urgent and necessary. The tribute to the composer from Bergamo is doubly significant as Muti is deeply linked to Don Pasquale. The intrinsic value of a work that is the culmination of a great tradition - that of the Neapolitan School and Mozart - is in fact added to the personal motif: this was the first title directed by Muti in Salzburg at the invitation of Herbert von Karajan. The program at Donizetti is completed with the Symphony n. 3 in E flat major, op. 55, the imposing Eroica by Beethoven whose funeral march passes from a solemn melancholy to a moved lament and in which the ideals of equality, freedom, fraternity unfold.

The deep love and constant commitment shown by Muti in promoting the rediscovery of composers and works of the Neapolitan School and their fundamental contribution to European musical history could not fail to be protagonists precisely in Naples: at the Mercadante Theater, for a concert that is also a ' preview of the 2021 edition of Napoli Teatro Festival, the program opens with the Spanish Symphony that Saverio Mercadante composed for I due Figaro. The manuscript was discovered in Madrid in 2009 by the Turin scholar Paolo Cascio; I due Figaro was created in 1826 from a libretto by Felice Romani for the Spanish capital, a continuation of the Mozartian Wedding and Rossini's Barber. Immersion in the world of opera is contrasted with that in the symphonic universe, with Symphony n. 9 in C major D 944 by Franz Schubert, the "Grande" which, composed between 1825 and 1826, did not have a public performance until 1839, when it was directed by Mendelssohn after Schumann had discovered it among the author's papers . Another "rediscovered" score therefore, a creation of great ambitions that represents a bridge towards the late Romantic symphony.

Schubert again, this time his Symphony no. 3 in D major D 200, in the Palermo program, the last stage of this tour; here Muti will be awarded honorary citizenship for his commitment to spreading the values ​​of peace and communion among peoples through the universal language of music.

Composed by Schubert in 1815, a few months after his eighteenth birthday, the Symphony no. 3 was publicly performed only much later, in 1881 in London. Of this middle work in the composer's early symphonic production, which sprouted among an incredible harvest of Lieder (almost 150 that year), the cantabile vein and the freshness of the melodic invention that unfold after the restless Adagio immediately jump to the ear. introductory. The musical itinerary ends with a story of social integration: in 1892 Antonín Dvořák was invited by patron Jeanette Thurber to direct the New York Conservatory, one of the first schools to admit women and African Americans. In contact with the immense spiritual and native repertoire, the composer combined two popular heritages, the Bohemian and the American, in his Symphony n. 9 in E minor op. 95, "From the New World": a real look at the future.