The New Year’s Eve concert featuring the Berliner Philharmoniker and tenor Jonas Kaufmann, conducted by Kirill Petrenko, has long been sold out.

The program gives sway to classics from Italian opera, including the aria Giuletta! Son io! from Riccardo Zandonai’s Giulietta e Romeo, a century after its world premiere at Rome’s Teatro Costanzi in 1922. Also on the program are extracts from Nino Rota’s La Strada.

Nino Rota – La Strada: Ballet and Orchestral Suite

The title was made famous thanks to Federico Fellini’s 1954 cult classic La Strada. More than ten years after composing the soundtrack, Rota’s ballet version premiered at La Scala in 1967. The one-act ballet starred Carla Fracci in the role of Gelsomina. For this version, Rota made use of segments from themes that had been composed for the film’s soundtrack and combined them with various original melodies and musical ideas taken from other famous Fellini soundtracks.

There followed an all-new Orchestral Suite based on music from the ballet. In 2021, Ricordi published also a reduction of the Suite for smaller orchestra, which was performed for the first time at the Philharmonie de Paris by the Orchestre National d'Île-de-France, conducted by Giuseppe Grazioli.

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Photo: Kirill Petrenko / © Wilfried Hösl