On Friday, March 27, 2026, the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini, based in Parma, Italy, will perform The Prophets, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Second Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, for the first time in its repertoire. The soloist will be Mihaela Costea, concertmaster of the orchestra, who is celebrating twenty-five years with the Filarmonica Toscanini. Several of the composer’s grandchildren will also be in attendance. Andrej Boreyko will conduct the program entitled “Sacro e Profano” [Sacred and Profane], which brings together the biblical inspiration of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Second Concerto and the dramatic intensity of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. The evening will open with De Rerum Natura by Leonardo Marino, a new commission of the Ecosounds project.
Written in 1931, The Prophets has a rich history that links it directly to Arturo Toscanini. In April 1933, at Carnegie Hall in New York, Toscanini conducted the world premiere performance with the New York Philharmonic; the soloist was Jascha Heifetz, to whom the concerto was dedicated. It is especially meaningful that the work will now be performed in Parma by the Filarmonica Toscanini, ensemble of the Fondazione Arturo Toscanini, the musical institution of the Emilia-Romagna region that bears the conductor’s name and honors his artistic legacy.
In his autobiography, Una vita di musica [A Life in Music], Castelnuovo-Tedesco explained the circumstances that led him to write a concerto inspired by his Jewish roots:
Hitler’s campaign against the Jews had already been underway for some time in Germany. I felt not only proud of my ancestry but compelled to perform an act of unambiguous solidarity by making an artistic declaration. I envisioned a great biblical triptych, in which the three traditional concerto movements would depict three major prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Elijah….The Prophets is the work that best resonates with my dramatic conception of a concerto, and perhaps, among the many concerti I have written, it is the most significant.