Rome, Jakub Hrůša on the podium and Karen Gomyo on violin close the 2025–26 Season of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia.

There are programs that seem to be constructed with a precise, almost theatrical, dramaturgical logic. What the’Orchestra of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia offers in the evenings of June 18, 19, and 20, 2026 belongs to this category: an arc that goes from the almost unconscious brightness of a brilliant teenager to the inner abyss of a man who knew he was fighting an unequal battle against himself.

It opens with the overture from A Midsummer Night's Dream, a page that Felix Mendelssohn He wrote at seventeen with an orchestral mastery that still perplexes musical education theorists today. It's not precociousness in the Romantic sense of the term—that sense that always implies some incompleteness—but true maturity, capable of translating Shakespeare into sound without diminishing or betraying it. The muted strings that open the overture have something suspended between dream and wakefulness, a lightness that isn't superficiality but rather that rare condition in which form and content coincide perfectly.

Next up is the Violin Concerto in E minor: perhaps Mendelssohn's most beloved work by the public, and not without reason. The decision to entrust the solo part to Karen Gomyo deserves attention. Internationally trained violinist — born in Tokyo, raised between Montreal and New York, student of Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School — Gomyo has developed an instrumental voice over time, one in which technical precision never stifles expressive impulse. The Mendelssohn concerto, with its seamless structure between movements and the famous solo opening that burns away any introductory hesitation, requires precisely this: a presence that can be intense without becoming rhetorical.

The second part of the evening changes register in a clear way. Symphony No. 4 in F minor by Pëtr Il'ič Tchaikovsky It is a work that the composer himself described in a letter to his patron Nadezhda von Meck as the depiction of an implacable Fate - that brass motif that bursts into the introduction and returns to punctuate every attempt at escape. The symphony was composed between 1877 and 1878, in the years immediately following the failure of his marriage to Antonina Miliukova, an event that brought Tchaikovsky to the brink of nervous breakdown. It's not necessary to reduce the music to biography, but it would be naive to pretend that this symphony can be listened to as pure sonic architecture: the tension between the weight of the first theme and the lyrical expanses that run through it has an experiential quality that imposes itself even before analysis.

Holding the reins of the program is Jakub Hrůša, a Czech conductor who has developed a relationship of evident affinity with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra over time. Hrůša belongs to that generation of European conductors—the same generation as Robin Ticciati, Klaus Mäkelä, and Lorenzo Viotti—who have successfully combined interpretive rigor and communicative ability without compromising one another. His Tchaikovsky, in particular, is known for avoiding the sentimental drift that often plagues interpretations of this repertoire, maintaining structural tension even in moments of greater lyrical relaxation.