From Piovani to Dardust, from Albrecht Mayer to Michele Campanella, from the new commissions to the Ninth of Beethoven: the new season of the Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana does not build a museum of masterpieces, but a geography of listening.
by Marialuisa Veneziano
21 October 2026
An orchestra, seen before it begins to play, is a rather mysterious organism.
Tens of people enter one after another, take place according to a geography established for centuries, arrange tools built according to even more ancient principles; then someone arrives, climbs on a small podium, raises two hands and from that multitude should be born a single thought.
Of course it never really happens.
And that's the thing.
An orchestra does not become interesting when fifty musicians seem one. Become interesting when fifty individualities manage to build a common form without stopping owning a different stamp, weight and function.
Perhaps we should start from here to read the symphonic season 2027 of FORM – Marchigiana Philharmonic Orchestra.
Why Music through, from January to May, with almost eighty concerts articulated in fourteen programs, it is not limited to crossing eras and genres: it seems to question the nature of the orchestra. The FORM puts in the same bill the eighteenth concert, Beethoven in the bicentennial of death, new commissions, the cinema of Nicola Piovani and the piano-electronic universe of Dardust; it calls interpreters like Albrecht Mayer, Michele Campanella, Pietro De Maria, Sergio Azzolini, Alessandro Carbonare, Luisa Prandina, Calogero Palermo and Andrea Zucco.
The question, then, is not only What will the FORM play in 2027?
It is more interesting:
How many different things can an orchestra be without losing its identity?
Before Beethoven: when the breaths began to claim a voice
The answer begins curiously before the great symphony.
The programme Francesco Di Rosa and Albrecht Mayer, soloist oboe of the Berliner Philharmoniker, Mozart, Beethoven and a Concert symphony by Federigo Fiorillo. To this is added the project with Sergio Azzolini, bassoon and direction, dedicated to the concert winds of the eighteenth century through Fasch, Zimmermann, Stamitz and Vivaldi.
It could look like the "old" area of the season.
It's almost the opposite.
Because in the 18th century the orchestra is learning what it can become.
Before the romantic symphony transforms the ensemble into a huge expressive machine, something subtler happens: the individual instruments gradually conquer an autonomous timbre personality.
The oboe is not simply a doubling.
The bassoon is no longer just the diligent servant of the bass.
The clarinet enters the orchestra permanently and offers something that the other breaths do not possess: an almost prodigious ability to change color through the registers.
Mannheim's school works on growing, dynamics, collective discipline, orchestral effects. Mozart listens to these developments and immediately understands that an orchestra should not only "support" a melody.
He can think through the color.
For this reason, the encounter between Di Rosa and Mayer is musicologically much more interesting than a simple exhibition of two great oboists.
The oboe is one of the instruments in which the very idea of orchestra is almost visible.
It has a recognizable attack, a timbre concentration that crosses the fabric without need of sound brutality. One sentence of the oboe can change the emotional temperature of an entire compagine.
And it will not be casual that the orchestra traditionally receives the first to agree.
Before the music starts, the orchestra learns to listen to an oboe.
Beethoven: When the orchestra discovers it can become a character
Then Beethoven arrives.
And everything changes.
The 2027 marks the bicentenary of his death, and the FORM intelligently chose not to liquidate the anniversary with a ninth celebratory at the end of the season. He built a route instead: Beethoven 1+1, with First Concerto and First Symphony; Michele Campanella in the double role of pianist and conductor in the Concerts n. 3 and n. 4; Pietro De Maria inEmperor directed by Michele Gamba; finally the Ninth with Davide Crescenzi, the Regional Choir ARCOM and the soloists.
It is almost a biography of the Beethovenian orchestra.
At first Beethoven still lives in the house of Haydn and Mozart.
But it has already begun to move the furniture.
The First SymphonyIn my opinion, it opens with a small act of harmonic insubordination: instead of immediately giving us the main tone, Beethoven begins with agreements that seem to look elsewhere.
He is not yet the man ofHero.
But it is already someone who considers classical form not a law to be respected but a place in which to introduce tension.
The same goes for First Piano Concerto. The soloist-orchestra relationship still belongs to the classical world, but the piano begins to ask for more space, more mass, more decision.
Then the Third and especially the Fourth Concert arrive.
And Beethoven makes a gesture that, still today, keeps something extraordinary.
The Fourth does not begin with the orchestra.
Start the piano.
Alone.
Easy.
Almost a private question in front of a room that expected the public rhetoric of the concert.
Then the orchestra responds, even from an unexpected harmonic territory.
It is no longer just the relationship between protagonist and accompaniment.
IS dramaturgy.
Piano and orchestra have become two characters.
Retrust this part of the route to Michele Campanella means therefore to put into play a much more complex interpretative question of digital brilliance: the relationship between structure, phrase and time must be governed.
TheEmperor: when the concert becomes public architecture
With the Fifth Concert, entrusted to Pietro De Maria and Michele Gamba, the relationship still changes.
The piano immediately enters into the orchestral gesture. The initial agreement of the orchestra is crossed by the great blooms of the solo instrument.
No long wait.
No ceremonial entrance of the protagonist.
The piano is present from the beginning, as if the distinction between orchestral introduction and solo exhibition could no longer be given for granted.
TheEmperor expands the concert space.
But then Beethoven performs one of his most beautiful miracles.
After the monumentality of external movements, the central Adagio seems to suspend the weight of the world.
And it is important to remember it because the "heroic" Beethoven is often misunderstood.
His greatness is not only in the fort.
He's in the knowledge how fragile a music must become because the fort, when he returns, still means something.
And then the Ninth breaks the last wall
At the end of the FORM path the Ninth Symphony.
It's inevitable.
But maybe we should stop listening to her as a monument.
Let us forget Europe, ceremonies,Innocent to joy, political uses, thousands of solemn executions.
We stay in front of the composite problem.
Beethoven wrote three symphonic movements.
Then he gets to fourth.
And it seems to question everything.
The orchestra recalls fragments of previous movements.
The cellos and smugglers intervene with that famous gesture that resembles a speechless recitative.
It is as if the symphony was looking for something that the orchestra, alone, can no longer say.
Then the impossible happens.
A human being gets up and sings.
The voice enters the symphony.
Not as decoration.
As a form break.
After decades in which the symphony had become the sovereign territory of instrumental music, Beethoven introduces the word.
The Ninth is not only a great symphony with choir.
It is the point where gender seems to declare:
I'm not enough.
And maybe this is the smartest way to celebrate it in 2027.
Not as a relic.
As a crisis.
Apollo, Dionysus and a timpane that changes history
Among the most curious programs is Apollo vs Dionysus, with Luisa Prandina at the harp, the direction of Manlio Benzi, the repertoire of Dittersdorf, a new commission to Guido Ricci and the Seventh of Beethoven.
The title is almost a philosophical statement.
The harp immediately brings with it the apolline image of the measure, of clarity, of the governed rope.
Then Beethoven arrives.
Seventh Symphony.
And above all the rhythm comes.
In the Seventh the rhythm does not accompany the form.
It generates it.
The first movement seems to gradually conquer its energy; in the second, the celeberrima initial rhythmic cell is so elementary that it seems almost nothing, yet it becomes the DNA of the entire movement.
Beethoven demonstrates something that the twentieth century will understand to the bottom:
a rhythmic figure can be more important than a melody.
He can arrange time.
It can become memory.
It can create a form simply by insisting.
Dionysus here is not chaos.
It's the body.
It is the pulsation that forces music to move.
And put in that same program a first absolute execution means avoiding that Apollo and Dionysus become two museum statues: the dialectic between form and impulse is also delivered to a living composer.
Mozart and Šostakovič: two smiles of which it would be wise to distrust
Another particularly intelligent approach is that between Mozart and Šostakovič, with Wakana Kimura and Valentina Peleg, together with a new FORM commission entrusted to Bianca Giacomoni.
At first glance it might seem like the comparison between balance and restlessness.
Mozart: clarity.
Šostakovič: 20th century, irony, tragedy.
But the labels serve especially until we really start listening.
Mozart knows perfectly the ambiguity.
Behind an apparent formal regularity can introduce sudden modulation, dissonance, a theatrical shift of character.
Šostakovič often makes the opposite gesture: it takes recognizable forms, dances, marches, almost classic gestures and leaves them slowly deform.
Both know the most difficult musical art:
say two things at once.
A phrase smiles.
Harmony does not smile at all.
A march proceeds with order.
And that order begins to disturb us.
To approach Mozart and Šostakovič means then to put the listener in front of the problem ofmusical irony: how can a score affirm something and, through stamp, harmony or accent, insinuate at the same time the opposite?
That's a program.
Not two important surnames put close.
One question.
Three works that do not exist in 2027
And perhaps the most important cultural data of the season is not about Beethoven, Piovani or Dardust.
It covers three names less immediately recognizable to the general public.
Guido Ricci. Bianca Giacomoni. Alessandro Meacci.
The FORM commissioned three new compositions, which will be presented in the first absolute execution within the programmes Apollo vs Dionysus, Mozart – Šostakovič and Idyllic and concert.
This is the part of the season that has the greatest risk.
That is why it is indispensable.
When we listen to Beethoven’s Fifth, we already know that history has promoted it.
When we listen to Mozart we have two centuries of interpreters, editions, analysis and public to ensure that it is worth it.
In front of an absolute first we have nothing.
No canon.
No guarantee.
No phrase from the school manual ready to explain why that music is important.
We only have music.
It's a beautiful condition.
And it is the condition in which listeners were found when all the works we call today "repertory" were new.
Tradition is not only preserved by continuing to perform masterpieces.
It also keeps allowing someone to try to write the next one.
Piovani: the musical memory when the image disappeared
Then the billboard enters the cinema with Nicola Piovani, who will direct the FORM in their own music: from the pages for the Taviani brothers to Life is beautiful and Fellini, together with Cyberknife with Alessandro Carbonare.
Here the musicological question changes again.
What remains of a cinematic music when we take off the film?
A good soundtrack lives in a paradoxical condition.
While the film flows, it must have sufficient strength to change our perception of the image, but sufficient discretion not to transform it into a simple accompaniment of music.
In concert, instead, the opposite happens.
The image is gone.
The sound remains.
And suddenly we discover that what we believed to remember as "scene" was also rhythm, interval, orchestration, thematic celebration.
Cinema has taught at the twentieth century one of the most powerful functions of music:
Let us remember something before we even know.
A theme returns.
And the spectator's memory returns with him.
It is a modern form of ♪, of course different from Wagner, but based on the same sound ability to build relationships through time.
Dardust and a misunderstanding to be eliminated: the orchestra is not "classic music"
Finally, Dardust, directed by Alberto Cipolla.
And that's where Music through perhaps comes to his most contemporary thesis.
When electronics, piano and orchestra meet, we almost always talk about "contamination".
It's a word we use too much.
It assumes that there are two substances originally as well that someone decides to dirty each other.
But the orchestra has never been pure.
She's changed all the time.
It incorporated new tools.
He changed the number of performers.
It has transformed the use of percussion.
He welcomed sax, piano, electric instruments, tapes, synthesizers.
The orchestra is not a musical genre.
It's a device.
A technology of stamp organization.
Haydn uses it one way.
Mahler in another.
Stravinsky in another.
Morricone leads to the film studio.
A contemporary composer can make it dialogue with electronics without having to ask for forgiveness to Beethoven.
The important question is not whether Dardust belongs to the "classic".
It is:
What can it do with an orchestra that could not do without it?
There begins musical criticism.
The rest are shelves labels.
An orchestra scattered in Marche
And finally there is a characteristic of the FORM that risks appearing purely organizational and instead possesses a deep cultural meaning.
The season will cross many Marche cities and will also reach locations outside the region; the project Music through, in the three years, it touched 38 municipalities and the FORM declares an increase of the audience of 45%, up to 27.000 presences.
It's not just tour.
It is a special way of conceiving an orchestra.
The large European symphonic companions are often identified with a hall and a city.
The FORM has a territorially widespread identity.
Ancona, Pesaro, Macerata, Fermo, Jesi, Fabriano, Fano, Senigallia, Osimo, Chiaravalle, Recanati, Urbino, Tolentino, Civitanova, San Benedetto and many other centres make up a sort of concert hall dispersed geographically.
The orchestra moves.
The audience changes.
Sound changes.
The theatre changes.
Music not — And yet, inevitably, music changes a little.
Because a symphony does not exist in the void.
It exists in a space, in front of certain people, at a certain time.
And it is here that the name Music through really acquires meaning.
Through time.
Through genres.
Through the cities.
But above all through the orchestra.
Because looking at this billboard, from the lightening concert of the eighteenth century to the ninth of Beethoven, from the new scores to the cinema of Piovani to the meeting with Dardust, what changes continuously is the way the same tools are called to be together.
And this is the most fascinating thing.
In 2027 we will still use violins, oboi, bassoons, clarinets, horns, timpani.
Instruments that existed, in more or less similar forms, much before us.
Yet someone will still be able to ask them something they never said.
Perhaps this is the real miracle of the orchestra.
Do not survive for three centuries.
But being survived without having yet finished finding out what can become.
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