The surprise of the traditional appointment with the New Year’s Concert at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice was the tribute to seventy years of Italian television, broadcast live as usual by Rai Cultura on Rai 1. The twenty-first edition was a directed by the renowned event maestro Fabio Luisi leading the orchestra and choir of the Fenice. The concert once again impressed the audience, who especially gave the tenor Fabio Sartori and the soprano Eleonora Buratto ovations and standing ovations.
The historic anniversary of January 3, 1954, the day on which Rai broadcasts began, was celebrated with a medley of the most famous theme tunes on television: from Gioacchino Rossini’s William Tell, which marked the beginning of the broadcasts, to Eurovision. Soundtrack. We go through the music that has become icons of Tg1, of Carosello, of Che tempo fa, the first meteorological format presented by Colonel Edmondo Bernacca, the show Studio Uno and the dramas Pinocchio and Gian Burrasca. At the end of the homage to television, the shout “Long live Rai” rang out from the stages to applause. The 100th anniversary of the death of Giacomo Puccini (November 29, 1924) and the 100th anniversary of the beginning of Italian radio (October 6, 1924) were also honored in the program.
The musical program of the New Year’s Concert consisted of two parts: an exclusively orchestral premiere with the performance of Symphony No. 2 in D major op. 73 by Johannes Brahms and a second dedicated to melodrama, with a number of arias from the most popular opera repertoire, sung by the tenor Sartori and the soprano, which ended with “Va, pensiero, sull” to the cheers of the audience, “golden wings” from Nabucco and with the toast “Libiam ne’ delighted glasses” from Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata. In the end, more than five minutes of applause convinced the artists to give the famous toast again. “From this wonderful theater we would like to send our best wishes to Italy for 2024, so that it will be a new year full of health, joy and beauty and, above all, a lot of music,” said Maestro Fabio Luisi.
The New Year’s Concert program featured a number of popular pieces from the operatic repertoire of Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini and Amilcare Ponchielli and began with the Verdian Chorus from Due Foscari “To Joy… The Wind is Silent, the Wave is Calm”. After the orchestral interlude from Puccini’s Manon, Lescaut served as an introduction to two very famous pages from Puccini’s Tosca, performed by tenor Fabio Sartori and soprano Eleonora Buratto: “E lucean le stelle” and “Vissi d’arte”. The choir of the La Fenice Theater was the protagonist in the piece from Verdi’s Traviata “Di Madride noi siam mattadori”.
Also in the program are the great classics of the melodramatic repertoire: Puccini’s Closed Mouth Chorus as well as “Un bel dì visto” from Madama Butterfly and “Nessun dorma” from Turandot were performed; by Ponchielli the great “Dance of the Hours” from the Mona Lisa.
The Superintendent Fortunato Ortombina and the Mayor Luigi Brugnaro welcomed the guests to the theater. With them on the central stage was the Austrian ambassador to Italy, Jan Kichert, nephew of, among other things, a cellist from the Vienna Philharmonic, who played at the first editions of the Vienna New Year’s Concert. “Today the ambassador is cheering on our New Year’s concert in Venice and not the one in Vienna,” joked the mayor. Giggles praised “the beautiful show” he saw. Before the concert began, Mayor Brugnaro, together with Superintendent Ortombina, wanted to welcome the theater employees and thank them for their excellent work.
