Programme Notes
Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome
A short history
The Orchestra and Chorus of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia are based at one of the world's oldest musical institutions. Founded in Rome in 1566 it was formally recognised by Pope Gregory XIII in 1585 when he gave it the title "Congregation of Musicians under the invocation of the Blessed Virgin and of Saints Gregory and Cecilia." Since then such eminent composers and musicians as Palestrina, Paganini, Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, Respighi, Nono and Berio have been associated with the Academy.
On 2 February 1895 the Academic Hall of the Via dei Greci was officially inaugurated and thirteen years later, in 1908, the Orchestra of the Academy gave its first concert. The Chorus, 90-strong, and the Orchestra have given an estimated 13,000 concerts in their history and, at home - with concerts in the Augusteo (built in the ruins of Augustus' Mausoleum) and the Auditorio Pio di Roma (situated near St.Peter's Basilica) - they have a regular audience of between 20,000 and 25,000 people, including 7,000 subscribers.
The list of distinguished conductors is headed by the Orchestra's Principal Conductors: Bernardino Molinari, Franco Ferrara, Fernando Previtali, Igor Markevitch, Thomas Schippers, Giuseppe Sinopoli, Daniele Gatti and, currently, Myung Whun Chung. In addition, between 1983 and 1990, Leonard Bernstein was the Orchestra's Honorary President. Other conductors have included a number of the most famous composers of the 20th Century - Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith - as well as such legendary conducting names as Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Victor De Sabata and Herbert von Karajan.
The Orchestra was the first Italian orchestra ever to appear at the BBC Henry Wood Proms in 1995, just one of its many concerts in a busy touring schedule which has recently included visits to Australia (with Sinopoli), South America (Maazel and Gatti), Russia (Gatti) and - with Maestro Chung - Spain, Portugal, China, Korea and Japan, where they were the resident orchestra at the Pacific Music Festival in 1998.
The Chorus also leads an independent life, and has appeared in many festivals, most often at Spoleto's Festival dei Due Mondi. Others have ranged from Paris's Festival of XX Century in 1952 to the 1987 celebrations of the 750th anniversary of the founding of Berlin. In 1995 the Chorus toured Canada and the United States as well as revisiting Berlin for concert performances of Verdi's Otello with the Berlin Philharmonic under Claudio Abbado.
Together the Orchestra and Chorus have made a number of recordings with such conductors as De Sabata, Solti, Maazel, Schippers, Giulini, Sinopoli, Bernstein (including Puccini's La bohème), Gatti and, most recently, with Chung. Their recordings of Fauré's Requiem for Deutsche Grammophon with Cecilia Bartoli and Bryn Terfel won a prestigious "Diapason d'Or" and other recent projects with Chung have included a Beethoven disc and a programme of sacred music in honour of the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ.
