The Roman Philharmonic Academy turned 200 years old and, on the anniversary day, it gave itself a celebratory day with a summit in the concert of the Mozart Orchestra with Daniele Gatti on the podium at the Olympic Theater. The maestro has taken up the legacy of Claudio Abbado, after the interim of Bernard Haitink, as guide of the international ensemble based in Bologna, made up of young first parts and soloists, at a truly high level. If we think that the Roman Philharmonic was born with the desire to encourage amateur practice, then transforming itself into an institution that organizes posters with professional interpreters, the party evening had the characteristics of the most authentic professionalism, referring to some of the composers who have done the history of the association, especially Stravinsky in the twentieth century. Gatti constantly returns to the neoclassicism of “Apollon musagète” and the Mozart Orchestra allows him, with shrewdness and intuition, to chisel every detail and every nuance with a wide breath. It was a Stravinsky piece that exceptionally, perhaps because it was an artifact, did not appeal to the composer Alfredo Casella, soul of the Philharmonic in the early twentieth century, as was a central musician for Italian instrumentalism in the nineteenth century, namely Giovanni Sgambati.
The Roman Philharmonic has always looked to the music of its time, so much so that it has now commissioned a new piece for the party from Georges Aperghis, who in 2020, during the first cloister for the initial wave of Covid, was inspired by a text by Pasolini , taken as a basis and also broken down into phonemes in “Contre-jour, le jour”, creating an intense ‘fighter’ character to which the baritone Lionel Peintre gave voice. Gatti thus continued in the wake of a first performance, after having baptized Giorgio Battistelli’s “Julius Cesar” as the opening of the Opera Theater, but he sealed the program with Mozart of the “Jupiter” symphony, so rich in meaning in the his reading with the eponymous orchestra to show once more how the masterpieces never cease to reveal links and folds of the musical discourse.