International pianist legend Martha Argerich and the great Italian conductor Fabio Luisi are the opening stars of the 2023/2024 season of the Rai National Symphony Orchestra in the – sold-out – concert presented by Rai Culture live on Thursday 26 October at peak action at 8.30pm on Rai Radio 5 From the Arturo Toscanini Ray Hall in Turin. Four years after her last appearance – with Liszt’s First Concerto for Piano and Orchestra – Martha Argerich returns to play with the Rai Orchestra and presents the cornerstone of Viennese classicism: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1. 1 Op. 15 Ludwig van Beethoven. It was composed between 1796 and 1797, and was first performed in Prague in 1798 with the composer himself at the piano.
In the second part of the evening, Fabio Luisi – Director Emeritus of the Rai Orchestra, who holds important positions with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo – will interpret Symphony no. 5 in E minor Op. 64 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. During his composing years, the composer’s fame became established, and even as a bandleader he began to enjoy success beyond Russia’s borders. In the winter of 1887-88, he undertook his first tour of Europe, during which he met Grieg and Brahms and conducted his works in Berlin, Paris, London and Prague. When he returned, he settled in his new country house, in Frolovko, near Klin. In the unusual calm of this situation, torment and neurosis gradually awakened: the composer began to reproach himself for the lack of an accurate artistic project and the absence of inspiration. He started to think it was over. Laziness brought him sadness, depression, fear of the future, and regret for the past that he could not return to. The only possibility of endurance of existence is action. Therefore, in 1888, not out of genuine expressive need, but rather to exorcise the ghosts that tormented his unstable psyche, his Fifth Symphony was born.
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