In an Italy that suddenly finds itself poorer after the recent passing of musicologist and critic Angelo Foletto — one of the noblest and most authoritative voices ever to narrate the multifaceted paths of sound — we attended this evening the sumptuous opening of the Teatro Ponchielli’s concert season, the first under the new management entrusted to Superintendent Andrea Nocerino. Thanks to an original and daring program, the RAI National Symphony Orchestra traced a spiritual itinerary from silence to voice, and from voice to body through dance: three different ways of looking at the end, of inhabiting time, ideally reconnecting with the Cremonese audience. If last year the season opened with the fateful hammer blows of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, this year it was the jingling of children’s toys in the Kindertotenlieder, evoked by the solitary toll of the glockenspiel, that summoned the same omen, building an ideal bridge between tragedy and the melancholy of farewell to one’s dearest loved ones.

A programming choice that goes beyond “classical” music in the narrow sense. The great Quirino Principe has argued this, and we are inclined to share his words, when he proposes defining art music as “strong” music: properly speaking, classical music is that of the brief historical span of the eighteenth century, while the true dividing line lies between creation that withstands time, endowed with intrinsic structure and value to be transmitted, and everything else, which remains as mere irritating background chatter.

Opening a concert with Les Offrandes oubliées by Olivier Messiaen meant immediately asking the listener for an act of availability that goes beyond immediate emotion, inviting inward silence. No brilliant introduction, no reassuring melody. The music unfolded as if already beyond time, as though the orchestral gesture were a prayer spoken in a half voice. Composed in 1930, Messiaen’s Méditation symphonique unwound in a suspended duration. The Cross, Sin, the Eucharist are not treated as images to be illustrated, but as states of being. The violence of La Croix burst in without development, almost like a wound; time slowed nearly to a standstill in the infinite melodies of Le Péché, with chords spread and brushed like planes of color. The concert’s opening did not aim at consolation or easy seduction, but rather invited us to look at suffering as mystery — or as rebirth — as Foron announced with proud and decisive bearing in his unexpected opening remarks. Orchestra and the exceptionally talented conductor were fused in a magnetic performance in which no accent, no timbral search was anything less than perfect.

After this abstract and sacred incipit, the performance of Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder marked an abrupt return to the human dimension. Here death acquired a face, a voice, and a story. Rückert’s verses, set to music by Mahler with almost painful restraint, speak of the loss of children without tragic emphasis, but with a sobriety that only amplifies the anguish. The orchestra withdrew; the word emerged fragile and exposed. At the center of the program, Fleur Barron’s voice unfolded with an expressive richness and velvety beauty of irresistible allure, capable of a declamation always anchored to prosody, finding in the orchestra a partner now passionate, now diaphanous, but always exquisitely sensitive and in close dialogue with her line. If Messiaen had stripped music of its narrative dimension, Mahler restores it in its rawest form: mourning is interrupted time, memory that seems unable to find rest.

The interpretative challenge was among the most arduous, yet the young Nicolò Umberto Foron demonstrated astonishing maturity: his gesture emanates from a lucid and calibrated intention, an equation in which the unknowns dissolve into the necessity of the steps leading to a crystalline resolution of the problem. Extreme rationality, but also extreme freedom in mastering micro-agogics and dynamic shifts that imprint his unmistakable mark on the performance. To move between Messiaen’s asceticism and Rachmaninov’s orchestral gigantism requires an architectural vision of sound one would expect from conductors far more advanced in years, yet Foron always maintained firm and absolute command of his musicians. The RAI National Symphony Orchestra once again confirmed itself as an ensemble of international stature, upholding its prestige with luminous beauty of sound, attentive and precise in coloring, in the subtle play of timbral illumination, in the hymnic surge of full utterance; one might also add a unified awareness of playing together (almost visually perceptible to the audience) in the spirit of noble and devoted participation in the expressive conception of the musical texts, offering moments of rare timbral beauty, especially in the final work on the program, Sergei Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances.

The journey did not in fact end with pain, however pacified, in the lullaby of the fifth Lied, in which the final quatrain, with the shift from minor to major, expands like a ray of sunlight breaking through the darkness after a storm. With Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, the composer’s last orchestral work, the concert once again changed perspective: we are confronted with music written in exile, close to the end, yet animated by an obstinate energy. Even when the thematic material looks back, as in the self-quotations from the First Symphony, the music moves forward, occupying all spaces. It is as if, after Messiaen’s silence and Mahler’s weeping, the orchestra had finally found the strength to shake itself and set itself in motion again — not to surrender to oblivion, but to transform memory into energy.

We heard passages of pure lyricism such as the iconic saxophone solo in the first movement: a melodic line so vocal and mournful as to recall its origin (it is said to have been intended for a singer who later fell ill during rehearsals, prompting the composer, on the musicians’ suggestion, to entrust it to the wind instrument). But it is in the finale of the Symphonic Dances that the conductor-orchestra partnership reached its apex, marked by the striking of the twelve bell strokes of the third movement. Those blows, which inexorably allude to the expiration of Time, reminded us that life’s difficulties are overcome through resistance, through the affirmation of vital presence boldly leaning over the abyss. The opening lines of Rückert set by Mahler in the Kindertotenlieder — “Now the sun dares to rise and shine again / as if no disaster had occurred in the night / The disaster did occur: certainly to me alone / and the sun shines everywhere and for everyone else, out there” — tell us two opposing and fundamental truths: that the universe is indifferent to our human miseries, and that only through empathy can we find redemption. Every child unjustly taken from life breaks the heart, and we like to think it is no coincidence that the choice of the RAI Orchestra together with the Ponchielli management fell upon this bitter and poetic cycle, to mourn together all children erased from life, in every age and in the atrocious present.

Honor is due to Andrea Nocerino for such a dense and courageous season opening. With the choice of a program that conceded nothing to superficiality or easy listening, the superintendent perhaps wished to suggest his personal imprint for the new course of the city’s principal theater, in which music does not merely serve an entertainment function, but enters into dialogue with the context of a complicated and uncertain historical moment, suspended between a will to destruction and contempt for the Enlightenment values that characterize our Europe. An evening of the highest profile, rewarded by the audience’s intense and prolonged ovations, which paid tribute, together with the exceptional quality of the performance, also to the idea of culture understood as civic testimony.

Just as Angelo Foletto taught us, throughout an entire lifetime.