Friday 19 / April / 2024
Muscat: World renowned South Korean conductor Myung-Whun Chung will direct the Filarmonica della Scala in two concerts as part of the opening of ROHM’s new House of Musical Arts for the 19/20 season.
Known as ‘La Scala’, Teatro alla Scala was established in the Italian city of Milan in the late eighteenth century and is arguably the most prestigious opera house in the world.
Filarmonica della Scala, the Philharmonic Orchestra of La Scala, was founded in 1982 under the leadership of the Italian maestro, Claudio Abbado, in order to add a symphonic dimension to the illustrious Teatro alla Scala.
Having conducted virtually all of the world’s leading orchestras and with an impressive record as a concert pianist, Myung-Whun Chung’s interpretation and direction of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor is bound to be exceptional.
This concerto, which is considered to be one of the most technically challenging in the classical piano repertoire, will be played by the virtuosic young Ukrainian pianist, Alexander Romanovsky, who has won major awards and has been performing since the age of fifteen.
The programme on the 17th of September also features Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor, an epic work spanning the extremes of the emotional spectrum in an atmosphere of pathos. Widely known as the Pathétique, this powerful work is considered Tchaikovsky’s greatest symphony.
It will be the first public concert to be held in the new theatre.
Held the next evening, on the 18 th of September, the second concert opens with selected overtures and intermezzi by the great Italian opera composers, Rossini, Verdi and Puccini, followed by Antonin Dvořák’s famous New World Symphony, No. 9 in E minor, which premiered in 1893 with the New York Philharmonic.
Dvořák explained that he did not incorporate Native American music in the symphony, but instead, ‘simply wrote original themes embodying the peculiarities of North American indigenous music; and, using these themes as subjects, developed them with all the resources of modern rhythms, counterpoint, and orchestral colour’.
