Falstaff

TUTTO VERDI – this edition to mark the Verdi bicentenary sets standards by which all similar projects will be judged. It includes all twenty-six operas by the greatest Italian stage composer, together with his immortal Requiem, all of them in definitive performances. “This is how Verdi should be played” – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on TUTTO VERDI

Based, in part, on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff is Verdi’s last work for the stage – and only his second comic opera. And yet the humour in this multilayered masterpiece is distinctly wry, for all the main characters exhibit an array of human weaknesses that are implacably exposed by Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito.

Stiffelio

TUTTO VERDI – this edition to mark the Verdi bicentenary sets standards by which all similar projects will be judged. It includes all twenty-six operas by the greatest Italian stage composer, together with his immortal Requiem, all of them in definitive performances. “This is how Verdi should be played” – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on TUTTO VERDI

The wife of a Protestant preacher as an adulteress – problems with the censor were inevitable from the outset with Verdi’s opera Stiffelio, which was premièred in November 1850. Even today the finale seems astonishingly bold: superficially it deals with forgiveness and reconciliation, but the orchestral writing is in such striking contrast that Verdi appears to be tolling the death knell of the protagonists’ marriage.

Attila

TUTTO VERDI – this edition to mark the Verdi bicentenary sets standards by which all similar projects will be judged. It includes all twenty-six operas by the greatest Italian stage composer, together with his immortal Requiem, all of them in definitive performances.

“This is how Verdi should be played” – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on TUTTO VERDI

Verdi, Un Ballo in Maschera

The 2014 Festival of the Arena di Verona is opened by the new stage design of the Verdi’s opera Un ballo in maschera by one of Italy’s great directors, Pier Luigi Pizzi, and conducted by Andrea Battistoni, a rising young talent in the intenational classical music scene.