Friday, January 10th, 8:30 PM at Auditorium Giovanni Agnelli
The baton of Myung-Whun Chung and the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia dedicated to two immortal masterpieces of the great German repertoire. The long-standing artistic partnership between the South Korean maestro and the prestigious Roman orchestra is renewed in the concert that opens the new year of Lingotto Musica on Friday, January 10th at 8:30 PM at the Auditorium Giovanni Agnelli. One of the world’s most acclaimed conductors in the prime of his interpretive maturity, Chung returns to the podium of the Roman orchestra twenty years after his last performance in the Concerti del Lingotto season in an evening focused on two giants of the 19th century: Beethoven and Brahms. The former’s Seventh Symphony will be performed, which Wagner defined as “the apotheosis of the dance” for its great rhythmic effectiveness; the latter’s Violin Concerto op. 77, featuring the virtuoso Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan, who made headlines in 2000 as the youngest winner in the history of the Sibelius Competition in Helsinki.
The renowned South Korean maestro Myung-Whun Chung conducting the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
Having previously served as Principal Conductor of the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia from 1997 to 2005, and a regular guest conductor since then, Myung-Whun Chung is Conductor Emeritus of the Filarmonica della Scala since 2023 and Principal Guest Conductor of the Staatskapelle Dresden since 2011 (the first ever to hold both positions), as well as Honorary Music Director of the Tokyo Philharmonic, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and the KBS (Korean Broadcasting System). He was recently appointed Artistic Director of the new Busan Opera and Concert Hall in South Korea. His long and exceptional musical career also includes: Music Director of the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken, Principal Guest Conductor of the Teatro Comunale di Firenze, and Music Director of the Opéra de Paris-Bastille. Throughout his career, he has conducted some of the most important orchestras in the world in Europe, Asia, and the United States. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, since 2008 he has been an International Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
As the first orchestra in Italy to dedicate itself exclusively to the symphonic repertoire, the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia has collaborated with the greatest musicians since 1908. It has been conducted by, among others, Mahler, Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, Sibelius, Hindemith, Toscanini, Furtwängler, de Sabata, Solti, Mengelberg, Karajan, Erich and Carlos Kleiber, Abbado, Thielemann, Temirkanov, Blomstedt, Dudamel, and Kirill Petrenko. Its principal conductors have included Bernardino Molinari, Franco Ferrara, Fernando Previtali, Igor Markevitch, Thomas Schippers, Giuseppe Sinopoli, Daniele Gatti, Myung-Whun Chung, and Sir Antonio Pappano, who was succeeded as Music Director by Daniel Harding in October 2024. Leonard Bernstein served as Honorary President from 1983 to 1990.
The Armenian virtuoso Sergey Khachatryan as soloist in Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77
The evening opens with the Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77, composed by Johannes Brahms in the summer of 1878 in Pörtschach and dedicated to the great violinist Joseph Joachim, who performed it at its world premiere on New Year’s Day 1870 at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. Critics hailed it as a masterpiece of the genre, second only to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for its lyrical songfulness and structural complexity. Performing this iconic work is the 39-year-old Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan, a regular guest of prestigious orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic. Winner of the Sibelius Competition in Helsinki at the age of 15 in 2000, followed by the First Prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 2005, he is also highly regarded as a chamber musician in a duo with his pianist sister Lusine, with whom he released the album My Armenia, dedicated to the commemoration of the centennial of the Armenian Genocide and awarded the ECHO Klassik in 2016.
Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony will conclude the evening
The program concludes with Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92, composed by Ludwig van Beethoven between 1811 and 1812, almost simultaneously with the Eighth Symphony. Its public premiere was organized on December 8, 1813, in the hall of the University of Vienna, during an evening to benefit Austrian soldiers injured in the Battle of Hanau. A page animated by an intense surge of life, the Seventh Symphony closes the “heroic” period of Beethoven’s symphonic output, transcending its individualistic anxiety and ideological implications.