La Scala’s 2011–2012 opera and ballet season announced

La Scala held a press con­fer­ence this morn­ing to announce its 2011–2012 sea­son.

How times, and tim­ing, have changed. Just ten years ago the sea­son was being presen­ted in late June, with roles “to be announced” and events “to be con­firmed”. Itali­ans are resigned to their fate: inef­fi­ciency — like cor­rupt politi­cians — is the norm, so with a shrug of the shoulders they say “povera Italia” and get on with their lives. Well there’s noth­ing like a reces­sion, coupled with a French Gen­eral Dir­ector, to shake things up.

La Scala has been act­ing more like a music fest­ival of late, with lots of niche operas and a dirth of world-class sing­ers. The buzz among sea­son ticket hold­ers is that the big names are afraid of the infam­ous La Scala log­gion­isti, the boo­ers up in the gods. Sea­son ticket hold­ers, pay­ing large sums of money months in advance of the per­form­ances, give a vital sta­bil­ity to La Scala’s bal­ance sheet. With a drastic dropoff in sea­son ticket requests over the last two sea­sons, it looks as though the theatre’s dir­ect­ors have decided to invent a more attract­ive pro­gramme. The next sea­son at the world’s most fam­ous opera house wouldn’t be out of place at the Met or Cov­ent Garden.

The 2011-12 pro­gram includes 13 operas — seven of those new pro­duc­tions — and seven bal­lets, two of which will be new.

The much-anticipated gala sea­son open­ing on Decem­ber 7 will be of a new pro­duc­tion by Robert Carsen of “Don Gio­vanni”, con­duc­ted by Daniel Bar­en­boim. A stel­lar cast includes Anna Net­rebko, Elīna Garanča, Peter Mat­tei, Bryn Ter­fel and Giuseppe Filianoti.

Net­rebko will also sing in “La Bohème” as Mimi, a role she will share on altern­at­ing dates with Angela Ghe­orghiu and Anita Hartig. There will also be a return of Franco Zeffirelli’s his­toric sta­ging of “Aida” — the 1963 ver­sion, not the 2006 one. Liss­ner called it a “homage” to La Scala’s history.

Unfor­tu­nately, the bal­let line up is much less inter­est­ing, with four of the seven titles — Excel­sior, Gis­elle, Mar­guer­ite and Armand and One­gin — star­ring Roberto Bolle, which is a bit of a bore. Svet­lana Zakhar­ova is back, along with reg­u­lar Leonid Sara­fanov, but apart from Olesia Novikova and Maria Eich­wald there are to be no other guest artists. Now if this were Lon­don, New York, Paris, Moscow or St Peters­burg no one would mind, but this is La Scala, and the res­id­ent artists are simply not outstanding.

But one step at a time. Hats off to Bar­en­boim and sovrin­tend­ente Stéphane Liss­ner for the opera sea­son, and maybe the next step will be to up the level of the bal­let sea­son too.

 

Photo: Anna Net­rebko and Elīna Garanča who will open La Scala’s sea­son in Don Giovanni

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