On Wednesday, March 5, 2025, at 5 p.m., at the Ridotto dei Palchi “Arturo Toscanini” of the Teatro alla Scala, a new event in the I Concerti dell'Accademia cycle, the initiative featuring the young students of the Scala School.
Soloists from the Academy of Improvement for Opera Singers, accompanied by pianists from the Master Collaborators Course, under the guidance of Alexandre Dratwicki, artistic director of the Palazzetto Bru Zane - Centre de musique romantique française in Venice, will pay tribute to Georges Bizet, whose double anniversary this year is the 150th anniversary of the premiere of Carmen and the 150th anniversary of his death.
Several excerpts from not only Carmen, still among the most performed operas in the world, or Les pêcheurs de perles, but also lesser-known works such as Vasco De Gama and La jolie fille de Perth will be performed. These will be juxtaposed with pages from Charles Gounod (Roméo et Juliette), Jacques Offenbach (La vie parisienne), Léo Delibes (Jean De Nivelle) and Jules Massenet (Don César de Bazan).
Taking turns in interpreting the arias are sopranos Marĺa Martĺn Campos, Laura Lolita Perešivana, Nazlican Karakaș, mezzo-soprano Dilan Șaka, tenor Haiyang Guo and baritones Wonjun Jo and Chao Liu. Accompanying them are master collaborators Daniele Di Teodoro, Marco Gatti, Liliana Hu, Nayeong Kim and Yingda Liu.
As Maestro Alexandre Dratwicki points out, the work with the Academy's young artists, prepared during a masterclass, was dictated by the desire to give them the opportunity, on the one hand, to refine their taste for a language as nuanced as French and, on the other, to deepen their knowledge of works that are less frequented but to be rediscovered for their musical richness.
The concert also marks the first anniversary of the collaboration launched in 2020 between the Accademia Teatro alla Scala and Palazzetto Bru Zane with the aim of giving students the opportunity to tackle the French musical heritage of the 19th century, whose rediscovery and international dissemination the Research Center promotes, dealing with both chamber music and the symphonic, sacred and operatic repertoire.
The concert will be partly performed again at the Palazzetto Bru Zane venue in Venice on May 16, at the close of the Spring Festival “Bizet, Rebel Love” (March 29-May 16, 2025), with a program that juxtaposes the Parisian composer with arias by other French composers of his contemporaries who animated the Ville Lumière between the Second Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic.
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