Admire Florence with your eyes and listen to her with your heart-that is the advice from the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Settled into their newly built and blazingly contemporary New Florence Opera House, the inspired upcoming season celebrates Florence’s rich musical past while also demonstrating that opera, ballet and classical music are far from antiquated art forms in Florence. The packed calendar comprises 200 events, 20 percent more than past seasons, and includes 15 opera titles, 12 ballets and 61 concert evenings.
The season opens in grand form, with Zubin Metha conducting Wagner’s powerful The Valkyrie, the second opera in his Ring Cycle, featuring the stirring ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’ Next up is Mozart’s dramatic Don Giovanni, about the fate of fictional libertine and seducer Don Juan, with Italian libretto by the Venetian Lorenzo Da Ponte.
With 2013 the 200th anniversary of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi, the Maggio Musicale is dedicating a series of operas and concerts, including its annual festival to the great Italian composer, one of the most famous worldwide. Opening the festival is Verdi’s Don Carlo, featuring a stellar cast that includes artists making their debut in Florence, among them tenor Massimo Giordano, beloved around the world, who will play the title role.
The 100th anniversary of the birth of the Benjamin Britten will be celebrated with a performance of his dark and powerful opera, The Rape of Lucretia. Mixing new with the old, the Italian premiere of George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, commissioned by the Maggio Musicale and other opera organisations in Europe, draws on twelfth-century legends to depict the explosive consequences of self-discovery.
The opera season continues with Antonio Vivaldi’s Farnace, Verdi’s tragedy Macbeth, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s The Servant Turned Mistress and Gaetano Donizzetti’s The Elixir of Love. Closing the season is Gioacchino Rossini’s comic masterpiece, The Barber of Seville.
Light, graceful and visually powerful, ballet from the MaggioDanza also forms a large part of the 2013 programme. Igor Stravinsky’s avant-garde Rite of Spring, highly controversial when it was first performed in 1913, is part of a tribute series to Stravinsky, which will also include The Soldier’s Tale and The Wedding.
Ten dances have been created specially for the MaggioDanza by young choreographers selected by an international panel; these will be performed during the shows Short Time II and Britten Portrait. Other ballets to look for are Herman Severin Lǿvenskjold’s La Sylphide, William Forsythe’s The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude and Pistoni’s La Strada.
On the concert bill are Carl Orff’s dynamic Carmina Burana, including the famous ‘O Fortuna,’ one of the 61 spectacular concerts that will include music from such classical composers as Mozart, Brahms, Dvořák, Mahler and Bach, as well as more modern composers, among them Gianluca Cascioli and Michele Dall’Ongaro. Watch out, too, for Zubin Mehta’s Masked Ball of Carneval in February.
And here is a warm thought for the cold, dark days of winter. The Maggio Musicale is performing a summer season of concerts and ballets at the Pitti Palace, including Ravel’s famous Bolero.
See www.maggiomusicale.it for dates, details and tickets.
