Last year’s conductor contest victor, Leonardo Sini, will lead the audience into the world of Italian music under the program title ‘Rendezvous in Rome.’ This time, however, we won’t meet Italian music’s great figures, Verdi or Rossini, but rather younger notables, turn of the century Respighi and Nino Rota, who is also known from 20th-century Fellini film soundtracks. The rendezvous’s other participant is not Italian, but French -- André Jolivet, whose resounding Trumpet Concerto No. 2 magics America and the world of jazz into the auditorium. Rota’s music creates a border between classical and entertainment music, while at the same time he belongs to that group of 20th-century composers that upheld a relationship with the audience, despite the contemporary avant-garde’s disapproval. Respighi’s pieces simultaneously recall Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage, Debussy’s impressionism and the Mediterranean world, in a word everything that Rome was at the turn of the century. Adventurers and sun lovers are all welcome to this Mediterranean winter night!