2025 SYMPHONIC SEASON – TEATRO G. VERDI, TRIESTE
From 11 September to 23 December 2025
*******
7th Concert
Friday 24 October 2025 – 7:30 p.m.
Conductor ENRICO CALESSO
Violin GIUSEPPE GIBBONI
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet, fantasy-overture in B minor
Niccolò Paganini Violin Concerto No. 2, Op. 7
Richard Strauss Aus Italien, symphonic fantasy in G major, Op. 16
ORCHESTRA OF THE FONDAZIONE TEATRO LIRICO GIUSEPPE VERDI, TRIESTE
The Teatro Verdi’s symphonic season welcomes back Giuseppe Gibboni, the 24-year-old violinist who has been a familiar and much-loved presence since winning the Paganini Prize in 2021. Now one of the most in-demand performers on the international stage, Gibboni continues to renew his special bond with Trieste. On the podium will be our conductor Enrico Calesso, who, with Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture and the Aus Italien symphonic fantasy composed by the 22-year-old Richard Strauss, offers a musical prelude to the upcoming opera season — from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette to Elektra — sealing a programme that once again confirms the Theatre’s flair for originality and its freedom from routine programming.
Two of the most acclaimed young Italian musicians on the international scene, Giuseppe Gibboni and Enrico Calesso, join our orchestra as protagonists of the seventh and penultimate concert in the Teatro Verdi’s highly successful symphonic season. The programme opens with the first widely acknowledged masterpiece by Tchaikovsky, the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, presented here in its much-loved final version. It then continues with Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 2, featuring Gibboni’s proven mastery and the splendid tone of his magnificent 1722 Stradivari “Jupiter”. Composed in Naples in 1826 in preparation for the composer’s major European tour two years later, the Concerto No. 2—written for a large orchestra—is among Paganini’s less overtly virtuosic yet most melodious works. Its famous final Rondo, later re-imagined by Liszt and Busoni among others, is distinguished by the presence of a silver bell within the orchestra which, in an effect of striking originality and enchantment, engages in a playful dialogue with the violin’s harmonics—almost a contest of crystalline chimes. The evening draws to a close with Aus Italien by the young Richard Strauss — a brilliantly orchestrated, vividly coloured work inspired by the composer’s Grand Tour of Italy. Conceived as a symphonic travel diary, it paints in sound Rome and its countryside, the Sorrento coast and, finally, Naples, with a lively tarantella and the unexpected quotation of the ever-popular Funiculì Funiculà. The melody and spirit of Liszt — echoing in both Tchaikovsky and Strauss, and serving as a model for Paganini — run like two fils rouges through the programme, alongside the musical bridge leading towards the forthcoming opera season.
The symphonic season, which so far has seen a remarkable increase in subscriptions and five sold-out concerts, as well as a world premiere by Giorgio Battistelli commissioned by the Theatre, will conclude on 23 December with the Chorus and soloists performing Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle.