On Thursday 10 November at 8 pm the third opera of the Maggio Autumn Festival program will be staged: Giuseppe Verdi’s “Ernani” will be on the program. On the podium of the Mehta Hall, at the helm of the Choir and the Maggio Orchestra, maestro James Conlon; directed by Leo Muscato.

The singing company ranks Francesco Meli as Ernani, María José Siri as Elvira, Roberto Frontali as Don Carlo and Vitalij Kowaljow as Don Ruy Gómez de Silva.

The first performance on 10 November will be broadcast live on Rai Radio3.
An international conference from 11 to 13 November to discuss the theme “Verdi and Spain”.
Il Maggio thanks Ferragamo.

Florence, 7 November 2022 – The Maggio Autumn Festival dedicated to Giuseppe Verdi continues; Thursday 10 November at 8 pm Maestro James Conlon, at the helm of the Choir and Orchestra del Maggio, for the penultimate opera appointment of 2022: Ernani by Giuseppe Verdi, the second of the three Spanish-themed operas of the Festival, will be on the bill, after Il Trovatore which premiered on September 29th and before Don Carlo, scheduled for December 27th. The direction is entrusted to Leo Muscato, the singing company is formed by Francesco Meli as Ernani; María José Siri as Elvira; Roberto Frontali in the role of Don Carlo; Vitalij Kowaljow in that of Don Ruy Gómez de Silva; Xenia Tziouvaras as Giovanna; Joseph Dahdah is Don Riccardo while the role of Jago is played by Davide Piva. In this new Maggio staging, the scenes are curated by Federica Parolini, the costumes by Silvia Aymonino and the lights by Alessandro Verazzi. The maestro of the Maggio Choir is Lorenzo Fratini. In presenting the work, superintendent Alexander Pereira said: “We have therefore reached the second appointment of our ‘Spanish Verdi’ cycle after the performances of Il Trovatore and the next Don Carlo, scheduled for December: I particularly love Ernani, an opera that each time fascinates me more and more; one of Verdi’s greatest masterpieces, with extraordinary musical ideas masterfully underlined by our great Orchestra, and with a skilful use of choral parts, made even more brilliant by our phenomenal Choir. Even the cast, in this new production for which we thank Ferragamo for their support, is truly stellar ”.

Four other performances scheduled on the bill: 15 and 18 November at 20 and 13 and 20 November at 15:30.

The first performance on 10 November will be broadcast live on Rai Radio3.

On the occasion of the Autumn Festival dedicated to Giuseppe Verdi and the programming of his three Spanish “mood” operas, Maggio organized an important international conference curated and coordinated by Giovanni Vitali and Giancarlo Landini: “Verdi and Spain” starting from 11 November at 3.30 pm in the gallery foyer of the great hall and which will start with a speech by the superintendent Alexander Pereira which will be followed over three days until 13 November and in 4 sessions Mattia Palma, Gaia Varon, Paola Ciarlantini, Giancarlo Landini. Pol Avinyò, Silvio Balloni, Giovanni Vitali, Leticia Ruiz Gòmez, Juan Carlos D’Amico, Michaela Valente, Piero Mioli, Felice Todde, Giovanni Bietti. Admission is free until all seats are available.

Furthermore, before each performance, the presentations to the public of the shows held by Katiuscia Manetta, Maddalena Bonechi and Marco Cosci continue: the guides are held in the Foyer of the Zubin Mehta Hall and in the Gallery Foyer of the Great Hall about 45 minutes before the start. of the show. For the performances on Sunday 13 and Sunday 20 November, at 3 pm, the initiative “Crescendo: theater in play, playing in the theater” continues: the adults attend the opera while the children are welcomed in a large rehearsal room of the theater and they are entertained by educators until the end of the play with games, music and stories related to the opera in the program.

The Autumn Festival therefore reaches its penultimate lyric appointment with Ernani, which returns to the May program almost sixty years after its last performance, which took place in January 1965 directed by Bruno Rigacci and directed by Filippo Crivelli. Verdi’s opera, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, made its debut at the Teatro la Fenice in Venice on March 9, 1844.

On the podium Maestro James Conlon, who returns to Maggio a few months after his last concert in February 2022: the maestro has linked his name to that of the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino for almost forty years; it was April 30, 1985 when the New York director made his debut on the Florentine stage, on the occasion of the performances of Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlo directed by Pier Luigi Pizzi. For this new production the maestro Conlon who said he was thrilled to be able to tackle this work for the first time, making Ernani his seventeenth career’s Verdi title, wrote a long contribution for the theatrical program from which some passages are extrapolated: “It will be Verdi’s seventeenth opera that I have directed since my first performance of Falstaff, almost exactly fifty years ago. Basically my approach to Ernani‘s conducting is no different from that of all Verdi’s other operas. The love I have always felt for his music and decades of experience in the Verdi repertoire are manifested in a wide-ranging vision of the context of the opera and the place it occupies in the composer’s artistic career “. Conlon continues by analyzing the themes that characterize the opera, one of the first of Verdi’s production: “Giuseppe Verdi represented the moral conscience of his time and knew deeply the issues related to honor. Within the complicated intrigue that involves Ernani‘s protagonists, the driving force of the work is to be found in the defense and in the pursuit of honor; the tragedy is in fact determined by the dark side inherent in the human soul which proves unable to understand all the implications of honor, giving more importance to appearance rather than to its substance. The protagonists, in fact, are slaves of their own passions and interests and, in wanting to pursue their own ends, dishonor the concept of honor. Ernani, Verdi’s fifth opera, is one of the artistic peaks of his early period, characterized by dark-hued and fast-acting dramas. In this opera Verdi made greater use of both air and ensemble numbers to give more movement to the action without being harnessed exclusively in moments of static and reflection. Ernani also represents Verdi’s first foray into foreign literature, the first of two works taken from texts by Victor Hugo, confirming what his path will be in the future choice of literary sources: French, Spanish, Anglo-Saxon and German, almost excluding entirely the Italian ones, the stereotyped or ‘mass-produced’ librettos ”.

James Conlon, one of today’s most versatile and respected conductors, has cultivated a vast symphonic, operatic and choral repertoire. He has conducted virtually all major American and European symphony orchestras since his debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1974. Conlon is also music director of the Los Angeles Opera (since 2006) and artistic advisor to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra since 2021. He has been Principal Conductor of the ” RAI National Symphony Orchestra from 2016 to 2020; Principal Conductor of the Paris Opera from 1995 to 2004; General Music Director of the Gürzenich Orchester Köln (1989–2003) and Music Director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra from 1983 to 1991. Conlon was Music Director of the Ravinia Festival, summer home of the Chicago Symphony for ten years and is now Graduate Music Director of the Cincinnati May Festival, the oldest choral festival in the United States, where he was music director for 37 years (1979–2016), one of the longest tenures of any director of an American classical music institution. As a guest conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York he has conducted more than 270 performances since his 1976 debut. He has also conducted in major opera houses and festivals including Wiener Staatsoper, Salzburg Festival, La Scala, Teatro dell’Opera. of Rome, Mariinsky Theater, Covent Garden and the Chicago Lyric Opera.

Not only Ernani‘s performances scheduled for James Conlon: on Saturday 12 November the maestro is busy, on the podium in the Great Hall, for a symphonic event that includes compositions by Ottorino Respighi and Dmitrij Shostakovič.

The opera is directed by Leo Muscato, who returns to Maggio after two years from another Verdi youth title he directed, Nabucco, staged in October 2020 under the direction of Paolo Carignani. Speaking of the ‘color’ he tried to give to this production and its protagonists, Muscato highlighted how the revolutionary spirit of the work was a fundamental aspect in the work carried out: “The setting we have chosen for this edition of Ernani it was suggested by the revolutionary and even a bit barricading spirit of the choir «Si awaken the Leon of Castile». The protagonists of this scene of the third act are conspirators who are trying to boycott the King of Spain, and who here swear they are ready to die in order to save their homeland. The opera debuted in 1844 and within a few months, the exciting pages of this choir drew the soul of many Italian revolutionaries. Inspired by the first Spanish insurrections of 1820-21, which subsequently spread to other European countries, up to several Italian states, we imagined Ernani and his acolytes as revolutionaries rather than bandits. It is against this revolutionary background that a fairly complex plot unfolds, hinging on the inviolability of pacts based on honor and resentment, which today’s canons of values make seem futile and a little selfish. So, in the end, Elvira remains the main victim of this tragedy. ”

After his experience as an actor in the company of Luigi De Filippo, he staged many shows, including: The journey of Alice by Evelina Santangelo; Solitude by Beppe Fenoglio; William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; Land of miracles on a text by him and Rosso Malpelo by Giovanni Verga. From 2005 to 2008 he was Artistic Director of the Leart’-Teatro company and subsequently directed All about my mother by Samuel Adamson (based on the film by Pedro Almodóvar and produced by Teatro Due in Parma and Teatro Stabile del Veneto); Moliére, unbeknownst to him, a text taken by him from Molière, with Paolo Hendel; Two of us by Michael Frayn, with Lunetta Savino and Emilio Solfrizzi; Euripides’ Trojan Women and Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, with Peppe Barra at the Veronese Summer Theater. He made his debut as an opera director staging Poulenc’s La voix humaine and Pagliacci by Leoncavallo at the Ponchielli in Cremona, a diptych produced by the Circuito Lirico Lombardo. In 2012 he directed La bohème at the Sferisterio in Macerata; The Fugue in Mask by Spontini (co-production of the Pergolesi-Spontini Festival of Jesi and of the San Carlo of Naples) and Nabucco (co-production of the Lirico di Cagliari and the Lirico di Sassari). The three shows earned him the Abbiati Award in 2013 as Best Director of the 2012 season. Later, he created numerous and popular productions, including: I masnadieri at the Verdi Festival; Nabucco, Wolf-Ferrari’s Il campiello and Marco Tutino’s Embers at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino; Rigoletto at the Rome Opera; A masked ball in Malmö, Sweden, and Rome; Nabucco at the Monte-Carlo Opera and at the Regio in Turin; The beautiful sleeping in the wood of Respighi at the Lirico in Cagliari; The coronation of Dario di Vivaldi and Agnese di Ferdinando Paër again at the Regio di Torino; The robbers in Parma, Bilbao and Monte-Carlo; Carmen at the Maggio Musicale; Tosca, Rigoletto and A Masked Ball at the San Carlo in Naples and I due Foscari at the Verdi Festival.

Francesco Meli plays Ernani and says of his character and opera: “I am really happy to propose one of my distinctive roles at the May Autumn Festival. Ernani is a revolutionary, a man outside the box, he defends his principles and his beloved at all costs, consistent with himself and his honor. He keeps his promises, right up to his death. A character who has a lot to teach us. And Verdi, once again, gives us a hero of ideals. The Ernani staged in Florence in the new staging signed by director Leo Muscato and under the direction of Maestro James Conlon, tries to outline these characteristics that I believe are fundamental. ” Meli does not fail to tie himself to current events and with regard to live radio coverage, he continues: “In my wishes, the performance of November 10, broadcast live on Rai Radio 3, in addition to giving us all the opportunity of an extraordinarily enlarged audience, will contribute to talk and to make people talk about Verdi, of his pre-eminence in the musical, political and artistic history of Italy, of the importance of keeping the spotlight on the story of the Villa Verdi in Sant’Agata, so that it can be enjoyed by the Italians as soon as possible ” . One of the most appreciated and esteemed Italian tenors, Meli began his career at just over twenty years old, first in the bel canto and Rossini repertoire and later in the opera, especially Verdi’s. Endowed with a vast repertoire spanning over fifty roles, during his career he has been directed by, among others, Riccardo Muti, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Chailly, Myung-Whun Chung and Daniele Gatti. He has won prestigious awards such as: the Abbiati Prize in 2013 for Verdi’s interpretations, The Golden Mask, the Oscar of Opera, the Zenatello Prize at the Arena di Verona, the Orazio Tosi Prize, the Carlo Alberto Cappelli Prize, the Prize Pertile, the Caruso Prize, the Lugo Prize, the Prandelli Prize, the Mascagni Prize, the Tiberini d’oro, the ISO d’oro, the Targa Labò and the Pavarotti d’oro. In November 2021 his first monographic album, Prima Verdi, was released, recorded with the Orchestra of the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino conducted by Marco Armiliato and published by Warner. He has walked some of the most prestigious international stages, from the Metropolitan of New York to Covent Garden. As for the symphonic repertoire, in addition to Verdi’s Requiem, the repertoire is those of Mozart, Donizetti, Dvořák and Andrew Lloyd Webber, Petite Messe Solennelle and Stabat Mater by Rossini, Messa di Gloria by Puccini and Mascagni, Inno delle Nazioni by Verdi , Dvořák’s Stabat Mater and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. He has also recorded numerous DVDs published by labels such as Deutsche Grammophon, Unitel, Opus Arte. Francesco Meli, who returns to the stage of the Maggio one year after the great success of the Traviata in September 2021 directed by Zubin Mehta and directed by Davide Livermore, will be a constant presence over the next few months, protagonist of three other works, including the Don Carlo scheduled for the next months of December and January and subsequently in La traviata and Carmen.

María José Siri, who returns to Maggio a few weeks after the recent performances of Il Trovatore, the inaugural work of the Autumn Festival, plays Elvira. “Making my debut in this Verdi jewel here in Florence, in a year full of Florentine commitments for me” said the famous soprano “makes me really happy: I am also very happy to be back to work together with Leo Muscato, with whom I shared, also here at Maggio, another of my Verdi debut with Nabucco a few years ago. Although Ernani is a different opera from the works of the first Verdi, I found and perceived in the character of Elvira, as well as for Lucrezia in the Foscari and Leonora in the Trovatore, a woman so suffering but courageous, ready to die for her love, and also rich in femininity. ” María José Siri studied at the Paris Conservatory with the famous Ileana Cotrubas. In 2002 she made her debut on the stages of Uruguay and Argentina, arriving in Europe in 2008 like her in Il Trovatore at the Carlo Felice Theater in Genoa under the direction of Bruno Bartoletti. One of the most popular Puccini and Verdi interpreters of recent years, he is a constant presence in the billboards of the most important international festivals and theaters such as the Teatro alla Scala, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, the Staatsoper of Vienna, the Staatsoper of Berlin and the Festival dell ‘ Arena of Verona and of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. On the Florentine scene, after her debut in 2011 for Aida conducted by Zubin Mehta under the direction of Ferzan Ozpetek, she was recently, in addition to the Trovatore, among the protagonists of another Verdi title, I due Foscari, fourth opera title of the 84th May Festival under the direction of Carlo Rizzi under the direction of Grischa Asagaroff.

Roberto Frontali, who returns to Maggio after the performances of Pelléas et Mélisande in June 2015, is Don Carlo, king of Spain, where the story takes place. Speaking about the work and the role he has already faced in his artistic past, Roberto Frontali said: “After a few years I will be back to face this role in a work where I believe the pursuit of beauty is exalted, without a shadow of a doubt, not only in music but also in singing: we could almost define it as a ‘Verdi bel canto opera’. In returning to take on the role of Carlo I noticed some nuances that I had not given importance to before: although this character does not have the emotional depths that characterize the great successive Verdi baritone roles as we see in Macbeth or Simon Boccanegra, we find two characteristics of the character which instead will remain typical: his public personality, where the thirst for power always prevails and his intimate emotional personality, where the (sincere!) love he feels for Elvira ‘commands’ his soul. ” Considered one of the most important baritones of his generation, after having dedicated himself at the beginning of his career to the study of the bel canto roles of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, he tackles the Verdi repertoire and, more recently, also the Puccini and verista repertoire. In the nineties he made his debut in L ’elisir d’ amore at the Metropolitan in New York and in Beatrice di Tenda at the Scala in Milan. Among the many important collaborations of his career are those with Claudio Abbado (Il barbiere di Siviglia); Riccardo Muti (La traviata, Falstaff and Don Pasquale); Zubin Mehta (The Force of Destiny, Lucia di Lammermoor and Falstaff) and Myung Whun-Chung (Don Carlo in Dresden and Rigoletto in Venice), performing in all the most important international theaters. Frontali has also linked his name to that of Maggio for almost thirty years: his debut took place in February 1994 in the production of Il barbiere di Siviglia directed by Paolo Olmi and directed by José Carlos Plaza.

Don Ruy Gómez de Silva is played by Vitalij Kowaljow, making his operatic debut at the Teatro del Maggio. After the victory of the “Plácido Domingo Operalia Competition” he has established himself in recent years as one of the reference basses in the international opera scene: with a vast repertoire that embraces over forty roles, he made his debut as Baldassare in La Favorite in the United States with the ‘New York Opera Orchestra and has since been regularly invited to the Metropolitan and to the opera houses of San Francisco, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia. He has also sung in the most important European theaters such as the Royal Opera House, the Paris Opera, the Bayerische Staatsoper, the Wiener Staatsoper, the Scala in Milan, the Arena in Verona and the Semperoper in Dresden. She played the role of Procida in a new production of Les Vêpres Siciliennes, directed by James Conlon at the Opéra Bastille in Paris and, in 2010, made her debut in the roles of Wotan and Der Wanderer in a new production of Wagnerian Tetralogy at the Opera of Los Angeles, also directed by James Conlon.

The cast is completed by Xenia Tziouvaras as Giovanna, Joseph Dahdah as Don Riccardo and Davide Piva in the role of Jago.