It's the Florida Orchestra's opening night tonight
You heard that right, it's the season opener tonight and I have tickets. So at 8pm, St. Pete's spectacular Mahaffey Theater rolls out all the stops for the Florida Orchestra 's performance of Ottorino Respighi's I Pini di Roma.
I'm particularly thrilled that Respighi's Pines of Rome is on deck for tonight, it's one of my favorite pieces of music and I have an attachment to it that defies my ability to describe adequately. As always, there's a story behind it but first a little background.
The Pines of Rome is the middle chapter in Respighi's three-part Roman Trilogy. He wrote his trilogy between 1915 and 1928 and each debuted as a separate work. The Roman Trilogy is Respighi's loving tribute to the sights, sounds and history of Rome. It's a work of mind numbing emotion and huge swaths of it leave me a babbling, weeping fool no matter how ofter I listen to this music. The first chapter in the trilogy is Fontane di Roma, the Fountains of Rome. The Second is I Pini di Roma and the the third is Feste Romana, Roman Festivals. Since the Orchestra's only playing the Pines of Rome tonight, I'll restrict my gushing to it.
Each chapter is broken into for sections and each describes a different scene. The Pines of Rome consists of I Pini della Villa Borghese (The Pines of the Villa Borghese), I Pini Presso una Catacomba (Pines Near a Catacomb), I Pini del Gianicolo (The Pines of the Janiculum Hill) and I Pini della Via Appia (The Pines of the Appian Way).
This is the opening section, The Pines of the Villa Borghese. It tells the story of children playing army under the pine trees in the Villa Borghese near the Pincian Gate. Feel free to play this and keep reading.
Here's how my connection to this composition came to be.
In May of 2008 I become staying in a Roman neighborhood subsequent to the Piazza Barberini. That's the lower arrow on this map.
The Piazza Barberini sits at the lowest of the Via Veneto and the Via Veneto begins on the Pincian gate. The Pincian gate is the top arrow.
Here's Google's Street View of the gate.
I want to rise up early and walk around when I'm journeying someplace. One of the satisfactory ways to learn about a metropolis is to observe it come to life within the morning. Rome has the added appeal of regular life unfolding against a backdrop of really historic structure. The Pincian Gate dates from the fifth Century and it changed into through this gate that Alaric and the Visigoths swarmed when they sacked Rome in 410. You understand the expression "Barbarians at the gate?" Well, right here's the vicinity it referred to initially.
The Pincian Gate stands at the top of the Via Veneto and is one of the entrances to the Villa Borghese. The Villa Borghese is essentially Rome's Central Park and it's also the site where the Visigoths camped during their year-long siege of Rome.
So, it's now May of 2008 and it's a gorgeous spring morning and I'm taking a walk by myself. I'd loaded up an iPod with Italian music before I left the US and on that morning, Ottorino Respighi was my play list. I started listening to his Roman Trilogy and I was finishing up The Fountains of Rome when I approached the Pincian gate. What happened next was completely unplanned but as I stepped through the gate, I Pini della Villa Borghese started. Right in front of me I saw this.
That's my picture of the real Pines of the Villa Borghese.
It hit me like a Mack truck that I was standing in the spot that inspired Respighi to write The Pines of the Villa Borghese. Since he'd written it around 84 years prior to my standing there, the odds were that I was looking at the very same trees he saw. I am not someone who's prone to losing control of his emotions. However, that realization, combined with the music I was was listening to was too much. I thought my head was going to explode as I burst into ecstatic tears and collapsed onto a low wall. I sat there for a while and listened through the rest of the Pines of Rome without taking another step. It was the wildest thing. It was as if I'd been given a private performance by the composer himself.
Hearing the result of a great artist's inspiration, whether it's a symphony or a banjo solo really gets my heart pumping. Better than other medium, a music invites you into an artist's world and then he invites you to stay. I get it that musical tastes are extremely subjective but no other musical form touches me quite the same way that a great, orchestral composition does. That a composer has an idea about how something might sound and then he goes out and creates the individual music for more than 100 instruments is an achievement of such stunning complexity it's hard to fathom.
Here's Respighi's entire Pines of Rome.
I Pini della Villa Borghese
I Pini Presso una Catacomba
I Pini del Gianicolo
I Pini della Via Appia
Now more than ever, community arts organizations, like my beloved Florida Orchestra , need your support. If you like the arts, whatever their form, patronize them. Go to the symphony, the ballet, the opera, a play. These organizations dedicate themselves the best humanity has to offer and they need your patronage to keep the lights on.