Will Crutchfield conducting Guillaume Tell, photo © Gabe Palacio
Dear Bel Canto Fans,
This year we have two operas for you that are both very dear to my heart - one classic and one surprise.
The classic is known to most Bel Canto devotees: Bellini’s heart-rending version of the Romeo and Juliet story, an infinitely beautiful score that is too rarely heard in New York. Its leading roles are perfectly suited to two singers the Teatro Nuovo public has showered with bravas in the past, Simone McIntosh and Alina Tamborini. We can’t wait to hear their voices intertwine in Bellini’s endless melodies!
The other is a real mission of recovery – a combination of detective work, scholarship, and championship. Anna di Resburgo is the creation of a brave woman who tried to “break the glass ceiling” back in the 1830s, Carolina Uccelli. She did not quite manage to get the place she sought in the men’s club of Italian theater composition – but she came tantalizingly close! The score she left behind shows how much she deserved that place, and how much the opera world lost by not giving her the chance to develop her art in a whole series of works.
Anna is Teatro Nuovo’s most ambitious undertaking to date, as the whole score and its history had to be reconstructed from manuscripts and documents “on the ground” in Italy. I hope you’ll read all about it, and hope even more you’ll join us as Chelsea Lehnea, Santiago Ballerini, and Ricardo José Rivera (our red-hot Poliuto trio) return to bring Uccelli’s romantic thriller to life on the stage.
Arrivederci,
