The national orchestra launches its 2026/27 programme with an inaugural concert of Romantic grandeur, virtuosic brilliance and vivid orchestral colour. Words by Joseph Camilleri
Well before the final curtain fell on another busy concert season, the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO) was already preparing to embark on a new year of musical adventures. The 2026/27 programme opens on September 4 at 7.30pm at the Mediterranean Conference Centre in Valletta, with an inaugural concert featuring the MPO under the direction of its principal conductor Michael Laus.
As is customary, the opening concert brings together a selection of large-scale works that showcase the orchestra in full force, with a particular focus on the rich sound world of the late Romantic and early twentieth-century repertoire. It is a programme that combines lyrical expression, virtuoso brilliance and sumptuous orchestral colour.
The scene is set by the Polonaise from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (1879). Based on Alexander Pushkin’s celebrated verse novel, Eugene Onegin is a lyrical opera centred on unfulfilled love, regret and the passage of time. The stately and grand Polonaise, which opens the final act, evokes the splendour of aristocratic St Petersburg, where Onegin and Tatiana meet again after years of separation.
Italian pianist Roberto Cominati is no stranger to Maltese audiences, having performed regularly in Malta, most recently as soloist with the MPO in Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain during a concert dedicated to the Spanish composer. He returns for this concert in a performance of Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54. Completed in 1845, the concerto developed from a single-movement Phantasie for piano and orchestra written four years earlier for Schumann’s celebrated pianist-composer wife, Clara Schumann. Rather than presenting the soloist as a virtuoso protagonist set against the orchestra, Schumann created a work built on dialogue, with piano and orchestra sharing and transforming the musical material. Although the concerto demands exceptional technical skill, its poetic and expressive qualities remain at its heart, making it both a celebration of pianistic brilliance and an intimate conversation between soloist and orchestra.
The second part of the programme is devoted to two highly descriptive and evocative works from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Composed in 1888, when Strauss was only 24, Don Juan established him as one of the leading figures in the genre of the symphonic or tone poem: an orchestral work inspired by a literary or dramatic subject. The protagonist of Strauss’s work is the legendary Spanish libertine who first appeared in a 1630 play by Tirso de Molina and subsequently inspired numerous artistic interpretations, including works by Molière, Lord Byron and Mozart’s celebrated opera Don Giovanni. Strauss based his interpretation on Nikolaus Lenau’s unfinished dramatic poem, which presents Don Juan not merely as a seducer but as an idealistic and restless seeker in pursuit of an unattainable vision of perfect love. The result is a musical journey into the psyche of this character, combining dazzling orchestral brilliance with a profound exploration of desire, idealism and disillusionment.
The concert concludes with Ottorino Respighi’s I Pini di Roma, the second part of the composer’s celebrated trilogy of tone poems inspired by the Italian capital, alongside Fontane di Roma and Feste Romane. I Pini di Roma is possibly the most immediately compelling and cinematic of the three grand works. It is structured in four movements, each depicting a Roman landscape associated with pine trees: Villa Borghese, a catacomb, the Gianicolo and the Appian Way. These physical settings inspire Respighi’s extraordinary gift for orchestral colour and provide an opportunity for the composer to indulge in vivid pictorial representation, from the nightingale recording incorporated into the third movement to the Gregorian chant that emerges in the second. The work culminates in a triumphant march along the Appian Way, a spectacular evocation of the grandeur and power of ancient Rome that is worthy of the soundtrack to a sword-and-sandals epic.
This inaugural concert brings together four composers whose works demonstrate the expressive and technical possibilities of the modern orchestra. It promises to provide a memorable opening to another season of outstanding orchestral music from the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra. As the MPO turns the page to a new season, audiences can look forward to an evening that celebrates not only some of the most colourful scores in the repertoire, but also the orchestra’s continuing artistic ambition and versatility.
