Rising stars
From international competitions to the concert stage, Min Gyu Song and Simon Zhu, two rising stars, face their greatest challenge – time – alongside the Orchestra della Toscana in a programme dedicated to Mozart: an account by artistic director Daniele Spini
Major international competitions serve to launch new talent. You don’t need to have won a competition to be a great conductor or a great soloist; sometimes, winning one isn’t enough.
It is the subsequent development of a career that tells us whether a particular competition was a success or whether the jury got it wrong. The Orchestra della Toscana, always on the lookout for new names, pays close attention to what happens in the major competitions. This is particularly true of those held in Italy. And in this case, it brings together two young musicians who, thanks to their resounding victories, are making a name for themselves in the concert world.
We often invite winners and finalists of the Cantelli Prize in Novara to conduct. Meanwhile, whilst entries for the 2026 edition are already open, we are hosting the Korean conductor Min Gyu Song. In 2024, he won both the first prize and the prizes awarded by the Management and Agencies Jury and the Milan Symphony Orchestra.
Other new friends have come to us from the Paganini Competition in Genoa: Simon Zhu, from Germany, won it in 2023. We immediately invited him to perform at an important concert, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.
Since then, he has embarked on an intense journey, full of brilliant achievements, and now returns to enrich our season in Florence and Tuscany.
The programme is classic, as classic as it gets: the last and most beloved of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s five violin concertos, and Ludwig van Beethoven’s final and most light-hearted purely instrumental symphony. The Eighth seems to leap back ten years through a period of revolutionary innovation to pay homage, part in jest and part in nostalgia, to the lost paradise of a youth long since ended.
