Andrea Obiso and Benedetto Lupo with students of the Festival dei Due Mondi Academy

The program reflects this richness of perspectives, bringing together a variety of chamber ensembles and alternating faculty members and students on stage in a journey through the Central European repertoire. It opens with Dvořák’s exhilarating Slavonic Dances Op. 46 (Nos. 3, 7, and 8) for piano four hands, vivid examples of the rhythmic vitality and folk-inflected color that the Czech composer lavished so generously upon his symphonic and chamber works. The program continues with Mahler’s Quartettsatz, the only chamber composition by the Bohemian composer to dispense with the human voice: an early work of striking expressivity and dark-hued atmosphere. This is followed by Joseph Haydn’s Piano Trio No. 39 in G major, Hob. XV/25, known as the “Gypsy” Trio for its final Rondo all’Ongarese, which incorporates characteristic elements of Romani street music traditions.

The program culminates in Schumann’s celebrated Piano Quintet, a Romantic masterpiece in which chamber interplay, passionate momentum, refined craftsmanship, and dazzling virtuosity achieve a synthesis that ensured its success from the very first performance in Leipzig, with Clara Schumann herself at the piano.