"Il cappello di paglia di Firenze" as Academy Project 2024
Beginning Sept. 4, Donato Renzetti conducts the Accademia soloists and ensembles in Nino Rota's Il cappello di paglia di Firenze, a new production that marks the opera season directorial debut of Mario Acampa, former creator of the Teatro alla Scala's children's shows.
The Sept. 10 performance will be broadcast live on LaScalaTv and will remain viewable on demand until Sept. 17.
Teatro alla Scala opens the curtain after the summer break starting Wednesday, Sept. 4: on stage for five performances Nino Rota's Il cappello di paglia di Firenze (The Florentine straw hat) directed by Donato Renzetti for the Accademia project. The show is signed by Mario Acampa, director and author of the Theatre for Children and Families shows. In addition to student or alumni soloists, musicians from the Accademia in the pit and the Accademia Chorus, the director's collaborators are also young and new faces: Riccardo Sgaramella for sets and Chiara Amaltea Ciarelli for costumes. Anna Olkhovaya's choreography completes the performance.
Rota composed Il cappello di paglia di Firenze in 1945, in the last months of the war, writing the libretto together with his mother Ernesta, who is evoked several times in Acampa's production, from a play by Eugène Labiche and Marc Michel about the misunderstandings aroused between two married couples and lovers by the disappearance of a straw hat eaten by a horse.
The opera was staged ten years later at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo to great acclaim and arrived at the Piccola Scala in 1958 under the baton of Nino Sanzogno and directed by Giorgio Strehler, before conquering the Piermarini stage in 1998 with Bruno Campanella on the podium, direction, sets and costumes by Pier Luigi Pizzi with Elizabeth Norberg-Schulz and Juan Diego Flórez enchanting leads.
The lightness of dreams and the perpetual motion of relentless action, explains Raffaele Mellace in his introduction to the opera for the September issue of Rivista del Teatro, are the essential features of Il cappello di paglia di Firenze, the musical farce, to a libretto by himself and his mother Ernesta, with which Nino Rota responded to the tragedy of World War II. The only Italian farce of the twentieth century, according to Fedele d'Amico. The work thrives on the magic of its setting in an imaginary Paris, poised between Labiche's paradoxical comedy to which it owes its subject and René Clair's cinematic masterpiece of the same name. A timeless ville lumière of the soul, perennially topical, able to fascinate, in almost seventy years of uninterrupted success, a very long series of directors of the first sphere: Filippo Crivelli, Ugo Gregoretti, Pier Luigi Pizzi, Giorgio Strehler...
The Florentine straw hat comes to the viewer with affable directness, with that sincerity alien to intellectualistic complacency that always animates Rota's music. Tradition of Italian melodrama and experience of the twentieth century (including musicals) concur with their tried and tested mechanisms of sure effect, employed without false modesty, to achieve the prodigy, so rare in the twentieth-century panorama, of a happy listening experience, urged on by music that is candidly tonal and serenely catchy.
For information:
relazioni.esterne@accademialascala.it
