Villa Belcanto is this year’s flagship production for the young artists trained and supported by the Mascarade Opera Programme and the New Generation Foundation in Florence.
The performance takes shape as a new musical dramaturgy, weaving together scenes, arias and duets from different operas into a single narrative journey, designed to showcase the stagecraft and musical talent of a new generation of performers.
Set in a luxury clinic poised somewhere between the 1920s and the 1940s, Villa Belcanto emerges as the transformation of a place of memory: no longer merely a private, idealised space, but a shared environment inhabited by a community in which youth, maturity and old age coexist and mirror one another. Within this ambiguous setting, what is meant to heal and protect also reveals itself as a mechanism of organisation, hierarchy and control.
The performance unfolds as a sequence of musical tableaux in which individual memory gradually opens onto a collective dimension, and in which the characters move through desire, vulnerability, rivalry, crisis and the possibility of renewal.
From Donizetti to Tchaikovsky, and on to Handel, the musical fabric accompanies this gradual shift in perspective, shaping an ensemble narrative in which intimacy and tension, discipline and disorientation, community and solitude coexist.
Villa Belcanto thus becomes a symbolic space in which the past resurfaces, the present is distorted, and each character is called to confront their own limits, fears and desires.
The production is directed by Federico Grazzini; the musical side is entrusted to the Filarmonica del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, under the baton of Maestro Wyn Davies.
ACT I
Slavonic Dance Op. 46 No. 1 in C major (1878)
Antonín Dvořák (1841 - 1904)
La Fille du Régiment (1840)
Act I, Scene V
“Quoi! Vous m’aimez?”
Gaetano Donizetti (1797 - 1848)
La Favorita (1840)
Act II, Scene II - III
“Ma de' malvagi invan sul capo mio…Vien, Leonora”
Duet Alfonso and Leonora
Gaetano Donizetti (1797 - 1848)
Eugene Onegin (1879)
Act II, Tableau II
“Kuda, kuda” and Duel Lensky and Onegin
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
ACT II
Ariodante (1735)
Act III
“Dopo notte”
Ginevra’s arioso
Duet “Bramo di mille vite
Georg Friedrich Händel (1685–1759)
Don Pasquale (1843)
Act II
Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848)
Production credits
ORCHESTRA FILARMONICA DEL TEATRO COMUNALE DI BOLOGNA
CONDUCTOR Wyn Davies
STAGE DIRECTOR Federico Grazzini
ASSOCIATE STAGE DIRECTOR Anna Laura Miszerak
SET AND COSTUMES DESIGNER Anna Bonomelli
TECHNICAL DIRECTOR Orlando Bolognesi
LIGHTING DESIGNER Giuseppe Di Iorio
STAGE MANAGER Maria Selene Farinelli
ASSISTANT STAGE MANAGER Alessandro Rossetti
COSTUME SUPERVISOR Beatrice Farina
PROPS SUPERVISOR Gloria Bolchini
SCRIPT Federico Grazzini
SCORE AND ORCHESTRAL PART PREPARATION Matteo Parmeggiani, M° Wyn Davies
PRODUCERS Francis Parham, Roger Granville
PRODUCTION MANAGER Olivia Giles
ASSISTANT PRODUCTION MANAGER Erica Fialà
ACTORS Davide Arena, Gabriele Badaglialacqua, Fabio Prieto Bonilla, Marco Bonucci, Maria Laura Caselli, Lucia Donati, Simone Maiorano, Alessandra Martino
Artists:
Benjamin Gautier, baritone
Anna-Helena MacLachlan, mezzo-soprano
Mariam Suleiman, soprano
Taylor Wallbank, tenor
Vuyisa Xipu, tenor
Jamie Andrews, répétiteur
Aya Robertson, répétiteur
Ferdinand Muradyan, bass
Charles Buttigieg, baritone
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