Philharmonia: Italy tour with Alessandro Crudele

Programme

The Philharmonia travels to Bari and Barletta with conductor Alessandro Crudele, a Milanese conductor of Apulian origin, who has established a close working relationship with the Philharmonia Orchestra. On the occasion of this Apulian tour, Crudele conducts the Orchestra for the fifth time in two years.

With his ability to shape “lines as elegant and clean as a Greek temple’s” (The New York Times), Martin Helmchen has a natural affinity with Mozart’s music. Mozart composed his Piano Concerto No. 16 as a vehicle for his own gifts, resulting in a piece that drips with apparently effortless elegance.

Brahms’s Fourth Symphony is masterful music from a composer at the top of his game. Brahms called it “my sad symphony”, but this modest adjective belies the composer’s emotional range and consummate structural skill. His friend, the critic Eduard Hanslick, put it better: “It is like a dark well; the longer we look into it, the more brightly the stars shine back.”

Music by Beethoven opens the concerts, with a work-out for the orchestra in the form of his adventurous Fidelio Overture.

The 26 November concert at the Teatro Curci in Barletta is dedicated to the legendary Carlo Maria Giulini, a conductor who was long associated with the Orchestra and born in this very city.