ORT | Battistoni_Masleev

Thursday, February 29, 9pm, at Teatro Verdi in Firenze, the concert featuring Andrea Battistoni (conductor) and Dmitry Masleev (piano).

Program:
Pëtr Il'ič Čajkovskij / Piano Concerto no.1, op.23
Aleksandr Borodin / In the Steppes of Central Asia
Nikolaj Rimskij-Korsakov / Sinfonietta su Russian Themes op.31

“A technical talent made up of rigor and flexibility” that shows “a remarkable maturation as an interpreter“. This is how Giuseppe Rossi, in the “Nazione” newspaper, described Andrea Battistoni on the podium of the Orchestra of Tuscany for last season’s final concert. The young conductor from Verona returns to the ORT: an opportunity to listen to him carefully, because it is quite unusual to find him in Europe often. In fact, in recent years his career has developed above all in Japan, where he has been commander-in-chief of the Tokyo Philharmonic for seven years. 

The concert sees Russia to the umpteenth degree, with the many popular themes present in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sinfonietta, one of the founders of Russian musical nationalism together with Borodin, whose Steppes of Central Asia describe boundless spaces in sounds: a caravan of Asians escorted by the tsarist army. Then comes a sensational hit, Tchaikovsky’s Concerto Op. 23, a testing ground for every piano virtuoso who aspires to the Olympus. Peaks that the Siberian Dmitry Masleev, winner of the prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 2015, can easily reach.