by InTrieste
The Teatro Giuseppe Verdi’s 2025 symphonic season continues to affirm the institution’s reputation for ambitious programming and refined musical sensibility. From September 11 through December 23, the theater will host a series of concerts designed to bridge the classical and the contemporary, culminating in Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle just before Christmas.
One of the highlights of the season will take place on October 24, when 24-year-old violinist Giuseppe Gibboni returns to Trieste’s stage under the baton of Enrico Calesso. Both artists, among the most internationally active Italian musicians of their generation, will lead the Orchestra of the Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi through a program rich in lyricism and historical resonance.
The evening will open with Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, Overture-Fantasy, a youthful work that captures the Russian composer’s first great synthesis of melody and drama. The concert continues with Niccolò Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in B minor, Op. 7, composed in Naples in 1826 and notable for its melodic elegance rather than sheer virtuosity. Gibboni, who won the Premio Paganini in 2021, will perform on his 1722 Stradivari “Jupiter,” lending a distinctive brilliance to the concerto’s famous Rondò—a movement distinguished by the delicate interplay between the violin and a small orchestral bell, a sonorous curiosity that later inspired Liszt and Busoni.
The program concludes with Richard Strauss’s Aus Italien, a symphonic fantasy written when the composer was just 22, following his travels through Italy. The four-movement work offers a vivid musical panorama: the Roman countryside, the bustling capital, the Sorrento coast, and finally Naples, where Strauss weaves in the familiar strains of Funiculì Funiculà into a buoyant tarantella.
For Teatro Verdi, the concert also serves as a musical bridge to the upcoming opera season, which will feature Romeo and Juliet by Gounod and Elektra by Strauss. In its thoughtful programming—linking Romantic introspection with late 19th-century grandeur—the theater once again distances itself from routine repertory choices.
The 2025 symphonic season has already seen strong audience engagement, with five sold-out performances and a notable rise in subscriptions. Earlier this year, it also premiered a new work by contemporary composer Giorgio Battistelli, commissioned by the theater. The series will close on December 23 with the theater’s chorus and soloists performing Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle, a festive finale to what promises to be a season of renewed vitality and artistic coherence for one of Italy’s most storied cultural institutions.
