With more than 50 years of experience as film director, Peter Greenaway (Nightwatching, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) combines the worlds of film and opera at the Festival Verdi in Parma with an all new approach to Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco, staged and edited by himself and Saskia Boddeke. Turning the auditorium into part of the set, Greenaway includes the unique architecture of the Teatro Farnese into his staging. With the help of spectacular video and light installations, he creates a completely new opera experience, using a striking imagery that includes depictions of the Madonna, modern manga girls and the real faces of refugee children. “It is a thrilling moment when threads of light spread over the darkened arches during the overture, shaping the architecture and flooding the whole area with changing light patterns.” (Daily Express)
Giovanna d’Arco
With more than 50 years of experience as film director, Peter Greenaway (Nightwatching, Eisenstein in Guanajuato) combines the worlds of film and opera with Giovanna d’Arco at the Verdi Festival in Parma. The opera’s libretto is based on Friedrich Schiller’s The Maid of Orleans. It tells the story of the French national hero Jeanne d’Arc. Earthly passion and supernatural purity are rendered vivid in the musical interpretation of the Virtuosi Italiani and the Coro del Teatro Regio di Parma, conducted by Ramón Tebar, and by three exceptional singers, Vittoria Yeo, Luciano Ganci and Vittorio Vitelli, “who have the Verdian idiom in their blood, performing veritable miracles of expressive singing and italianità” (Kieler Nachrichten). Turning the auditorium into the scene, Greenaway includes the unique architecture of the Teatro Farnese, one of Italy’s oldest and most exceptional theatre gems, into his staging. By the help of spectacular video and light installations, he creates a completely new opera experience, using a picture language that reaches from depictions of the Madonna to modern manga girls and the real faces of refugee children.
Spontini, La fuga in maschera
This early work of Gaspare Spontini, a composer once known for his grand operas written for the courts of Napoleon, Berlin, Vienna etc., is found at an antiquarian book dealer in England in 2006 and performed for the first time since 1800 at Festival Pergolesi e Spontini in Jesi. Corrado Rovaris and I Virtuosi Italiani, known for their historically informed performances on non-historical instruments, play “with great verve and joy” (Milano Finanza). Director Leo Muscato “transforms the typical Neapolitanstyle musical comedy into a shrill, irreverent, over-the-top spectacle” (Corriere della sera).