Teatro Carlo Felice, Genoa, 22/10/2026
Opening concert, Symphony Season 2026–27
Orchestra della Fondazione Teatro Carlo Felice di Genova, Jordi Bernàcer — Conductor; Kevin Zhu — Violin
Programme
Gioachino Rossini: Overture to La scala di seta
Niccolò Paganini: Violin Concerto No. 2 in B minor, Op. 7, MS 48, La campanella
Hector Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14
Genoa’s Teatro Carlo Felice opened its 2026–27 symphony season with an exhilarating journey from Rossini’s theatrical elegance, through Paganini’s astonishing virtuosity, to the passion, obsession, dreams and death of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.
Under Jordi Bernàcer, the orchestra delivered an evening in which dazzling individual brilliance was ultimately surpassed, for this listener, by the collective achievement of a compelling symphonic performance.
Rossini’s overture to La scala di seta immediately established a sense of confidence. Bernàcer and his players created the buoyancy and momentum at the heart of Rossini’s music without sacrificing precision or lightness. Its rhythmic vitality, elegance and theatrical wit emerged naturally, while the music’s intricate details remained clear. It was an engaging beginning.
Then came Kevin Zhu, the young American violinist who won Genoa’s prestigious Premio Paganini in 2018, performing Paganini’s Second Violin Concerto, La campanella. Zhu made Paganini sing as well as astonish. His extraordinary technical brilliance was matched by an ability to find lyrical expression within music whose formidable demands can so easily become an end in themselves.
There were moments when the dialogue between soloist and orchestra seemed less fully realised. The orchestral players appeared almost to join the rest of us as spectators to Zhu’s brilliance. Yet how could it be otherwise, at least occasionally, in a concerto so unmistakably designed to showcase Paganini’s own extraordinary virtuosity?
The audience’s response was remarkable. One curtain call followed another, and Zhu rewarded increasingly enthusiastic applause with three of Paganini’s Caprices. Even this was insufficient for an exuberant audience demanding a fourth encore.
When Zhu appeared for his fourth curtain call, however, he came without his violin. The message was unmistakable: there would be no more. It was a delightful theatrical conclusion, sending an exhilarated audience into the interval. Here was a young virtuoso performing in Paganini’s own city, receiving an ovation that celebrated both his musicianship and Genoa’s enduring affection for its most famous musical son.
For all the excitement of Paganini, however, the unqualified triumph came after the interval. In Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, Bernàcer created one compelling dramatic journey while preserving the distinctive character of its five movements. Berlioz’s exploration of passion, obsession, dreams and death can sometimes emerge as a succession of contrasting orchestral episodes. Here, the movements became parts of a larger dramatic conception.
From the emotional turbulence of the opening movement through the ballroom’s elegance and the pastoral countryside, the music developed with accumulating purpose. The march to the scaffold and the grotesque visions of the witches’ sabbath brought the narrative to its extraordinary conclusion. What impressed most was not simply the excitement of those final movements, but the sense that Bernàcer had prepared their arrival through everything preceding them. Individual orchestral voices emerged clearly within an increasingly rich and integrated collective sound. This was conducting that combined theatrical imagination with an understanding of symphonic architecture, allowing Berlioz’s contrasting musical landscapes to flourish without losing their dramatic coherence.
There was another revelation during the evening, one that prompted me to reconsider the previous week’s opening of the opera season, when Bernàcer had conducted Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. On both occasions I was seated towards the front of the auditorium, only a few rows apart. Yet the orchestral sound was strikingly different. For Figaro, the orchestra occupied the pit, while the singers performed on stage. For the symphony concert, the orchestra itself occupied the stage, transforming the relationship between musicians, auditorium and audience. The difference was genuinely ear-opening. Individual instruments and orchestral sections emerged with greater clarity and definition, yet the orchestra also produced a richer, more powerful and integrated sound. Far from sacrificing the whole to its constituent parts, the performance allowed both to flourish.
This experience gains additional significance from the Carlo Felice’s distinguished acoustic reputation. Reopened in 1991 following reconstruction after severe wartime damage, the theatre combines a substantial modern stage with an auditorium designed with particular attention to sound. For a listener accustomed to hearing the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in the very different surroundings of Adelaide Town Hall, the experience was illuminating. The shape, scale and depth of the Carlo Felice stage, together with the auditorium’s acoustic character, created a remarkable immediacy and presence.
It also prompted reflection on Figaro. Our musical judgements are shaped not only by conductors and performers, but also by the architecture and acoustic circumstances in which we encounter them. In Berlioz, this marriage of instrumental clarity and orchestral richness was particularly rewarding, helping Bernàcer communicate both the distinctive character of each movement and the dramatic trajectory of the whole.
The concert was an impressive opening to the Carlo Felice’s new symphony season. Rossini demonstrated the orchestra’s agility and refinement. Zhu’s Paganini supplied the most dazzling individual performance and an extraordinary public response. But it was Berlioz who revealed the greater possibilities of conductor, orchestra and auditorium working together.
The lasting impression was not simply one of orchestral brilliance, but of music experienced as a sustained and compelling dramatic journey