Santa Cecilia on Tour. European Consonances with a Walk in Hamburg

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Hamburg . Italian orchestra, English conductor, German audience, and the concert that runs wonderfully makes you feel that European integration is something done, easy and natural. At least in spirit . It may also be thanks to the power of music – it has been like this for a few centuries, after all – but it is especially from a seat in the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, one evening in May, that one can grasp in this perspective such a clear idea of ​​Europe, and such obvious reasons to be pleased with it.

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On stage the Orchestra dell'Accademia nazionale di Santa Cecilia , the most international of our orchestras: Hamburg was the second of five stops that took it from Barcelona to Katowice, in Poland, and two more tours are scheduled between now and the summer, while in Hamburg – the rich symphonic calendar of the Elbphilharmonie already lets us know – it will return in less than a year, in March. On the podium the musical director of the Cecilians, Daniel Harding , and next to him in the first part of the concert “the American friend”, the solo violin of Joshua Bell, this year's artist in residence in Rome . The program was based on the Bohemian axis Dvorak-Mahler, whose personal stories, following our Europeanist suggestions, mean Vienna and Prague and the Habsburg Empire almost to its exhaustion , but also England and Germany (at the Hamburg Opera Mahler conducted a lot, even the German premiere of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin) to then both turn towards the new American horizons.

In Hamburg, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra is almost at home: seven years ago, a few months after the inauguration of the Elbe Philharmonic, the first concert was held in the magnificent hall with over two thousand seats , a composition of terraces at different heights that embrace the stage on all sides. The grandiose building that contains it, planted on a pier stretching between the Elbe and a canal, when viewed from the mouth of the river looks like a ship leaving Gotham City: anything but an auditorium. With the waves that mark its profile above, with the walls of the upper part made of glass that reflect the leaden colors of the northern sky, it has redesigned the panorama of HafenCity, once the area of ​​the port closest to the center of the city and the hub of its economic development, today a neighborhood that is the result of a vast plan for urban and social redevelopment.

A neighborhood with few people around, which still seems to be searching for an identity but which reveals, from the cars churning out from the garage ramps – apparently only Audis, Mercedes and BMWs – a widespread well-being, which is accompanied by casting a glance beyond to the viewpoint of the usual cycle paths, clean streets, trains and metro that run punctually on the elevated roads . Hamburg is the first German city in terms of per capita income, and in the Elbphilharmonie project, whose costs have risen over the years of construction up to 789 million euros, it has put in a lot of money, and heated controversy, but also the soul and heart of the city that saw the birth of Mendelssohn and Brahms, that had as musical directors of the city's cathedrals Telemann and the most famous of Bach's sons and that in its musical historiography would also put the debuts of the Beatles, who began to make themselves known to the world right here in 1960-61.

It must have been this pedigree, and even more an intimate familiarity with music, the adherence to the quietly bourgeois rite of the concert, the very expectation for die Italiener, that filled the large hall of the Elbphilharmonie. And then, after hearing the intense and never over the top reading of Dvorak's Violin Concerto, that aroused such warm applause for Joshua Bell and made him almost explode after the virtuosic Ysaye of the encore. The second part of the concert marked, as anticipated in Rome, the beginning of the journey of Harding and the Orchestra di Santa Cecilia into the symphonies of Gustav Mahler . The First, therefore, which, although still stylistically uncertain between the symphonic poem and the symphony (or perhaps precisely because of this), already contains within itself all the aspects of Mahler's poetics. Harding's reading, which is transparent and controlled without losing expressive warmth, does not, however, tame those "foreign" elements that Mahler brought in after having opened the fence of the symphony that was now too closed in on itself: a rustic dance, a mockery of the oboe or clarinet, a mocking funeral march, a rough popular rhythm or a klezmer echo. And the Cecilians gave their best, as a whole and individually: from the peremptory leap of the wind instruments (first parts all worthy of applause) to the fascinating color of the strings across the entire sound spectrum. The audience responded with equal enthusiasm.

Ultimately, a concert is a concert , whether the Italians of Santa Cecilia are playing in Hamburg, the Berliners in Italy or the Wieners in Paris. But in Hamburg something more happens. Just a fifteen-minute walk from the Elbphilharmonie will take you to the blackened bell tower of St. Nicholas Church, what remains of the church, obliterated by the devastating Allied bombing that in July 1943 transformed a good part of the city into a sea of ​​flames and killed something like 45,000 civilians. From there you can get an idea of ​​how far Germany has come in processing mourning and guilt , while remaining immune in Hamburg from the poisons of old and new resentments (in the March elections for the Hanseatic city-state, the far-right AfD stopped at 7.5 percent, while the SPD confirmed its position as the leading party). That path, undertaken for the spirit of survival, continued here more than elsewhere under the banner of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, was also taken in the name of a possible and desirable reconciliation and coexistence. A bet on a common future that in an evening that aligned the music of a Jewish composer, the gesture of an English conductor, the joy of Italian performers and a German audience, seems to have largely begun.

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