The Sovrintendente of the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, Carlo Fuortes, has announced the nomination of the composers Giorgio Battistelli and Alessio Vlad as the theatre's artistic directors and has confirmed that Eleonora Abbagnato will become the director of the ballet company.
Alessio Vlad will be responsible for opera programming and Giorgio Battistelli with organise theatre events and contemporary and symphonic music.
Vlad, who has been carrying out this role already, has followed in his father's footsteps. Roman Vlad was a composer who became the Artistic Director at La Scala and was a Sovrintendente at the Rome Opera. Son Alessio has composed film scores and is a conductor. Battistelli will join him in leading the troubled theatre out of its current unstable period. Battistelli's latest opera, based on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, will open at La Scala later this year and he is currently the leader of the Jerwood Opera Writing Programme hosted by Aldeburgh Music.
The Mayor of Rome, Ignazio Marino, said,
Now the Rome Opera has strenghtened its team, guided by the excellent results achieved by Carlo Fuortes, creating a group with a high-quality profile, assembled to value all the talents who are present in this theatre.
The artistic management is broadened by confirming the continued presence of Alessio Vlad and adding the name of of Giorgio Battistelli… together with the name of Eleonora Abbagnato. These are all guarantees for artistic growth that we can offer both at the Teatro Costanzi and at the Caracalla Baths. After the difficult task, begun last year, to put the theatre's accounts in order, Rome Opera now has the possibility to work towards artistic and cultural projects of quality.
Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.
His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.
