On Friday, October 18th at 8:30 PM at the Giovanni Agnelli Auditorium

Drawing on two of the many souls of late-Romantic Russia – the lyrical one of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and the pyrotechnic one of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto – the Concerti del Lingotto Series opens with Alan Gilbert conducting the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester on Friday, October 18th at 8:30 PM at the Giovanni Agnelli Auditorium. This is the only Italian stop on a European tour that will also include Freiburg, Friedrichshafen, Köln, Basel, and Munich. The concert marks the double debut of the American conductor and the prestigious German orchestra, of which he has been Principal Conductor since 2019. Considered almost unplayable due to the high virtuosity required of the soloist and known thanks to Scott Hicks’ film Shine starring Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush, the “Rach 3” will be performed by the great Russian-Israeli pianist Yefim Bronfman.

The debut of the New York conductor Alan Gilbert

Grammy Award-winning conductor Alan Gilbert (1967) has been Chief Conductor of Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester since fall 2019 and Music Director of the Royal Swedish Opera since spring 2021. He also holds positions as Principal Guest Conductor of Japan’s Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony and Conductor Laureate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. The first native New Yorker to serve as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, he concluded his transformative eight-year tenure in the post in 2017. In addition to his appointments, Gilbert maintains a major international presence, making guest appearances with orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, and Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. He has conducted operatic productions for the Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Zurich Opera, and Santa Fe Opera, where he served as the inaugural Music Director. He made his acclaimed Metropolitan Opera debut in 2008, leading a production of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic that, when released on DVD, went on to win a Grammy Award. He was also nominated for the 2015 and 2016 Emmy Awards for Outstanding Music Direction in PBS’s Live from Lincoln Center broadcasts of two New York Philharmonic productions: the orchestra’s celebrated staging of Sweeney Todd, and its 100th-birthday gala tribute to Frank Sinatra.

The NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester of Hamburg

In Hamburg, where his contract was extended through the 2028-29 season, Gilbert continues to lead the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, founded in 1945 on the initiative of the British military government (initially named Sinfonieorchester des Norddeutschen Rundfunks, then NDR Sinfonieorchester in 1956), towards new artistic heights. Under the baton of distinguished conductors such as Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, Günter Wand, Christoph Eschenbach, Christoph von Dohnányi, Thomas Hengelbrock, and Krzysztof Urbański, the orchestra laid the foundation for the post-war musical renaissance in Germany, solidifying its international reputation with a repertoire spanning from the Baroque period to the present day. Based at the Elbphilharmonie since 2017, it has found the perfect home in this majestic, futuristic auditorium on the banks of the Elbe, where it can fully express its artistry through a rich program of concerts, festivals, and online streaming.

The formidable “Rach 3”

The evening opens with Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30, with which the pianist-composer Sergei Rachmaninoff captivated American audiences during his first overseas tour, which began in New York in 1909. Considered one of the greatest challenges for a pianist, the work is a typical example of a piece with a classical structure but primarily oriented towards exploiting the virtuosic possibilities of the instrument, remarkable for its sincerity of inspiration and for the aura of nostalgic lyricism that runs throughout the composition.

Yefim Bronfman, “Mr. Fortissimo”

As one of the greatest pianists of the past half-century, Yefim Bronfman will be performing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. Born in Uzbekistan in 1958 (then part of the Soviet Union), he emigrated with his family to Tel Aviv at the age of fifteen. There, he received his musical education before further honing his skills at various American institutions (The Juilliard School, Marlboro School of Music, Curtis Institute of Music) under the guidance of Rudolf Firkušný, Leon Fleisher, and Rudolf Serkin. Winner of the Avery Fisher Prize and nominated six times for the Grammy Awards, a prize he won in 1997 with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the recording of Bartók’s three Concertos, Bronfman is appreciated for his piano technique combined with an impressive clarity, especially in the Romantic and late-Romantic repertoire. In 1976, at just eighteen years old, he performed Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 on a US tour with the Israel Philharmonic, while in 1991 he held a series of recitals in Russia with Isaac Stern. His extensive discography includes the complete Prokofiev Concertos with the Israel Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta, Magnus Lindberg’s Second Piano Concerto with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Alan Gilbert, and the soundtrack for the Disney film Fantasia 2000. In the midst of a career that saw him perform all over the world alongside major orchestras and conductors, Philip Roth dubbed him “Mr. Fortissimo” and “Brontosaurus,” recounting one of his concerts in the novel The Human Stain.

Tchaikovsky and the Fourth Symphony

The programme concludes with Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36, composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky between 1876 and 1877. This was a period of both artistic and personal turmoil for the composer. Artistically, it was a fruitful period that saw the creation of Eugene Onegin and the Violin Concerto in D major alongside the Fourth Symphony. However, personally, Tchaikovsky was struggling with an unhappy marriage to Antonina Miliukova. As expressed in letters to his benefactor and confidante, Nadezhda von Meck, to whom the symphony is implicitly dedicated, the Fourth Symphony symbolizes humanity’s pursuit of happiness in the face of fate. Among Tchaikovsky’s six Symphonies, this one encapsulates the composer’s most fragile and feverish qualities, characterized by exceptional imagination and a wide range of emotions, from sentimentality to passion, from a somber sense of fate to unrestrained spontaneity.