30.09.2022

THERESA KRONTHALER | World Premiere of Nicola Campogrande's Second Symphony

The world premiere of the Second Symphony by the Italian composer Nicola Campogrande is the inspiration for the leitmotif of the Roma Tre Orchestra's entire concert season: "La musica per un mondo nuovo - Music for a new world".

Nicola Campogrande's reflections on his new work: "As a human being and a musician, I felt powerless in these times of war. I had the impression that I could not stop the drama we were all experiencing together in my head. Until I said to myself: a composer has the sensitivity and the means to reflect artistically on what is happening, and he has the moral duty to look forward. So in April last year, I came up with the idea of writing my Symphony No. 2, "A New World": I wanted to try to give a musical response to the fears that are sweeping our continent in these months and seem to threaten the thousand years of civilisation that we have produced, preserved and renewed over centuries. To make my idea more forceful, I asked my librettist Piero Bodrato to invent a text for the last movement: I wanted the voice of a mezzo-soprano to sing of our humanity, of beauty, of breath, of life. And he wrote wonderful words celebrating the act of singing as a human activity common to every people and every civilisation - capable of bringing into being even that which did not exist until a moment ago. This is why we chose the phrase "A New World" for the title of the score: They are words of confidence in a world today riddled with fear, words for a new world in which we want to live, a world that music promises us once again."

Theresa Kronthaler will perform the vocal solo part in the world premiere of this work in Rome and Milan, accompanied in each case by the Orchestra Roma Tre and the Orchestra Sinfonia di Milano.

Cast

Theresa Kronthaler, mezzo-soprano
Sieva Borzak, Joel Sandelson, conductor
Orchestra Roma Tre | Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano