I Solisti Veneti is a renowned chamber orchestra founded in Padua in 1959. Under the musical leadership of its founder Claudio Scimone, the ensemble made a name for itself primarily through its performances of Italian Baroque music. Over the course of more than 60 years, I Solisti Veneti have performed in around a hundred countries and have been honoured by the European Parliament with an official plaque, recognising them as "Ambassadors of culture and music across the borders."
Since 2019, Giuliano Carella has served as the orchestra's music director, and in 2020, he also became its artistic director. Carella is committed to both the operatic and symphonic repertoires, regularly conducting in prestigious concert halls such as Paris’s Salle Pleyel, London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw.
Massimo Mercelli, a renowned flautist, has worked with some of the biggest names in music, including Philip Glass, Krzysztof Penderecki, Gabriel Prokofiev, Valery Gergiev, and Ennio Morricone. In 2023, Mercelli and I Solisti Veneti premiered three flute concertos that were specially composed for him by Oscar-winning composer Nicola Piovani.
The orchestra will also highlight the works of Nino Rota, who is best known as Italy’s leading composer of film music. His Concerto for Strings, with its four movements, is a thematically cohesive work, including a notable allusion to Johann Sebastian Bach’s famous “Air on the G String.”
British composer Rachel Portman made history as the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Original Score. Her extensive catalogue includes over a hundred compositions for film, television, and theatre. At the 73rd Ljubljana Festival, her latest work, Filmscapes for Flute and Orchestra, commissioned by I Solisti Veneti and Massimo Mercelli, will be performed.
The concert will conclude with Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony, created from material he wrote as a child and dedicated to his childhood viola teacher. It was first performed in 1934 with Britten conducting an amateur orchestra. The final piece of the evening will be the Chamber Symphony in C minor—Rudolf Barshai’s string orchestra transcription of Dmitry Shostakovich’s celebrated String Quartet No. 8, marking the fiftieth anniversary of Shostakovich’s death.
