Italian bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni will make his house debut at La Scala in 2017 as Leporello. It will be only the second opera he has sung in Italy. The performances of Don Giovanni are just before his 42nd birthday. Astonishing: a prophet is not without honour save in his own country. I grew up musically outside […]
Le Nozze di Figaro
Beppe Menegatti answers the Gramilano Questionnaire… Directors’ Edition
Q&A When did you first go to the theatre? To see Rigoletto at the Teatro Comunale in Florence on 10 October 1939 for my tenth birthday, with Gino Bechi, Ferruccio Tagliavini, Lina Aimaro and the young Giulietta Simionato as Madelena. Why did you want to work in the theatre? In Florence we give out presents for the Epiphany. When I was six […]
Great American soprano Evelyn Lear dies at 86
Great American soprano Evelyn Lear died yesterday at 86. She was one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated American 0pera and concert singers, enjoying a long and remarkable career spanning 5 decades and including 7,500 operatic and concert performances. Between 1959 and 1992, she appeared in more than forty operatic roles, appeared with every major opera company in the […]
Glyndebourne 2012 includes new Figaro directed by Michael Grandage
Tony and Oliver Award-winning director Michael Grandage will stage a new production of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro as part of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s 2012 season. Grandage, the artistic director of London’s Donmar Warehouse, returns after staging Billy Budd for Glyndebourne in 2010. He most recently directed the Donmar production of Red to acclaim on Broadway in 2010. The director will […]
Ildebrando d’Arcangelo – “Mozart is my god”
Tomorrow the new CD by Ildebrando d’Arcangelo is in the shops, or in a couple of weeks’ time is you’re in the US. Called simply Mozart, it gives the Italian baritone scope to present the repertoire he’s most at home with, and with which he’s won some of his greatest acclaim. Mozart is my god. He […]
Welsh soprano Dame Margaret Price has died aged 69
Dame Margaret Price, possessor of one of the world’s most beautiful soprano voices, has died from heart failure at the age of 69. She passed away yesterday morning at her home near Cardigan, Ceredigion. She was born into a musical family in Blackwood, Monmouthshire. In her youth she rarely competed at Eisteddfodau but dreamt instead of becoming a biology teacher. It […]
Luca Pisaroni – the new bass-baritone on the block
With ten years of professional singing under his belt, Luca Pisaroni is starting to make big waves. Here is a well-disciplined voice with a personality, whose owner is good actor and has a charming stage presence. You might have caught him in Giorgio Strehler’s legendary production of Le Nozze di Figaro at the Opéra Bastille […]
