Janáček and Debussy: double opening for Festival dei Due Mondi between symphonic and opera

Spoleto, June 22, 2023 - The 66th Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto opens tomorrow friday June 23, 2023 at at 8:30 p.m. in Piazza Duomo, with a concert by the Orchestra of theAccademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia led by Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša in a program entirely dedicated to Leoš Janáček. A great connoisseur of his compatriot's music, Hrůša chooses Sinfonietta, three Lachi Dances , and layouts a new Suite from The Crafty Little Fox, with scenes from the originalopera . He is joined by soprano Louise Alder in the part of Bystrouška, soprano Corinne Winters as Lišák, and baritone Roman Hoza as the gamekeeper. to about the suite Hrůša says, "Leoš Janáček'sThe Cunning Little Fox is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of 20th-century musical theater. This opera fairy tale, starring woodland animals, actually conceals a second level of reading, a philosophical reflection on life and death, a pantheistic representation of the natural cycle in which humans and animals move on two separate planes that, however, intersect and overturn each other, producing unexpected discoveries, fatal accidents of poignant beauty. The range of emotions is wide ranging from comedy to eroticism to to painful nostalgia. It is a comicopera in which the tragic end of the protagonist, the fox, does not exclude a happy ending for the main human character ofopera, the elderly gamekeeper."

The debut of the new production of Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande is expected on Saturday, June 24 at at 20 at the Teatro Nuovo Gian Carlo Menotti, marking the return ofopera opera to the Spoleto Festival from 2019. The new production of which Iván Fischer is conductor and director, together to Marco Gandini, features musical performances by the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Costumes are by Anna Biagiotti and sets by Andrea Tocchio. The international voice cast includes Bernard Richter and Patricia Petibon as Pelléas and Mélisande, Nicolas Testé (Arkël), Tassis Christoyannis (Golaud), Yvonne Naef (Geneviève) and Peter Harvey. Alberto Mattioli writes in the auditorium notes "From the very beginning one point was clear: Pelléas et Mélisande, however one judges it, is a'opera different from all the others, a radically new hypothesis of musical theater and destined to to exhaust itself. Of Debussy, to genius aside, the consistency is incredible. [...] On the occasion of the debut of his opera, Debussy wrote a text, entitled Why I Wrote Pelléas, which contains a very precise statement of his intentions: "from long time I had been trying to make music for the theater, but the form I wanted to give it was so unusual that after several attempts I had almost given up. I wanted to give music a freedom that it contains perhaps more than all the other arts, since it is not limited to to a more or less exact reproduction of nature, but expands to the mysterious correspondences between nature and imagination.'"

Meetings with artists are also back: on the mornings of performance days at at 11 at the Festival Garden (free admission) the public can meet from up close the protagonists of the shows interviewed from Andrea Penna. friday June 23 are guests Iván Fischer and Jakub Hrůša, Saturday, June 24 Lonnie Holley and Gabriele Gianni, Sunday, June 25 Leonardi Lidi, Benjamin Millepied and Alexander Tharaud.