PRESS RELEASE
Venice, 14 May 2015
The 2015-2016 Opera, Ballet and Symphony Season
Fondazione Teatro La Fenice has presented its 2015-2016 opera and ballet season,
including eighteen titles from November to November: Idomeneo by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi, the ballet La Bayadère by Ludwig Minkus with choreography by
Thomas Edur da Petipa, Stiffelio by Giuseppe Verdi, a diptych made up of Susanna’s Secret by
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari and Agenzia matrimoniale by Roberto Hazon, Les Chevaliers de la Table
ronde by Hervé, Le Cinesi by Christoph Willibald Gluck, Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini, Il
ritorno dei chironomidi by Giovanni Mancuso, La Favorite di Gaetano Donizetti, Il barbiere di
Siviglia by Gioachino Rossini, L’amico Fritz by Pietro Mascagni, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt
Mahagonny by Kurt Weill, Eliogabalo by Francesco Cavalli, L’elisir d’amore by Gaetano
Donizetti, Norma by Vincenzo Bellini, Il signor Bruschino by Gioachino Rossini, and Il medico dei
pazzi by Giorgio Battistelli. The season is offering nine new productions, six revivals, a guest ballet
and two operas for children and teenagers, with a total of 118 performances, once again confirming
the combination of innovation and repertoire, and the high number of performances that is
characteristic of the Opera House’s production model. The season was presented in Milan by the
the Superintendent Cristiano Chiarot and the Artistic Director Fortunato Ortombina.
Highlight of this season will be three challenging productions of masterpieces that are
rarely performed by Mozart, Donizetti and Verdi: Idomeneo, until now only performed at La
Fenice in 1981 and 1993, and which will open the season with a new prestigious production
conducted by Jeffrey Tate with direction by Alessandro Talevi, one of the new up and coming
talents of contemporary direction; La Favorite, on stage at La Fenice for the first time in French
(after its twentieth century revivals in Italian in 1965 and 1988), conducted by Donato Renzetti with
direction by Rosetta Cucchi and Veronica Simeoni debuting in the role of Léonor de Guzman;
Stiffelio, an 1850 masterpiece that led to La Traviata and the bourgeois melodramas of the
composer’s mature works but which Verdi withdrew in 1856 owing to problems regarding
censorship; it was revived for the first time in Parma in 1968 and, with a bold philological idea by
Giovanni Morelli was revived for good at La Fenice in 1985. The opera will be staged in the edition
published in 2003 based on the handwritten manuscript that was discovered in 1992, in a new
production with musical direction by Daniele Rustioni and direction by Johannes Weigand, who
recently won the Abbiati Award in 2015.
Of the other new productions, three are from the comic nineteenth-twentieth century
repertoire with the first Italian performance of Les Chevaliers de la Table ronde by Hervé, a
refined and irresistible Parisian opéra bouffe from 1866, staged in Venice with a production by
Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de Musique Romantique Française and by Compagnie Les Brigands;
Pietro Mascagni’s comic opera L’amico Fritz last performed at La Fenice in 1955, conducted by
Fabrizio Maria Carminati and directed by Simona Marchini; and a diptych made up of two one acts
from 1909 and 1962 respectively: Susanna’s Secret by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (a belle époque hymn
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to the cigarette) and Roberto Hazon’s Agenzia matrimoniale (marking the tenth anniversary of his
death), staged with musical direction by Enrico Calesso and direction by Bepi Morassi, and sets,
costumes and lights by the set design school of the Venice Academy of Fine Arts as part of the
Fenice Atelier Project at Teatro Malibran.
The production of Kurt Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny to a text by Bertolt
Brecht is dedicated to the historic twentieth century and will be performed for the first time in
Venice in its integral version in three acts (after the two productions of Mahagonny Songspiel in
1949 and 1973), in a new production directed by John Axelrod and directed by Graham Vick, coproduced with Teatro dell'Opera in Rome.
Last but not least, the contemporary and Baroque will be represented at Teatro La Fenice
with its last two new productions: the Italian première of Giorgio Battistelli’s Medico dei pazzi, a
Neapolitan opera based on the same-named comedy by Eduardo Scarpa that will be performed in
Venice just two years after its world première in Nancy; secondly, Francesco Cavalli’s Eliogabalo
that will be staged in the Doge’s Palace as part of the 2016 “The Spirit of Music in Venice”
Festival, adding a piece to the project to further the Lombard composers production in which
masterpieces such as La Didone, La virtù de’ strali d’amore and L’Eritrea have been produced in
the last ten years.
A great ballet classic, La Bayadère to music by Ludwig Minkus in a new choreography
version by Thomas Edur based on the 1877 original by Marius Petipa will go on stage in the
Christmas season in a production by the Estonian National Ballet of Tallin, who already came to
Venice with The Nutcracker Suite in 2012.
As far as the revivals are concerned, in addition to the two by Rossini, Signor Bruschino and
Barbiere di Siviglia, Norma by Bellini (with direction by Kara Walker), Elisir d’amore by Donizetti
and La Traviata by Verdi (which will offer a stimulating comparison with the earlier Stiffelio),
Puccini’s Madama Butterfly will be of particular importance, with the 2013 production by Àlex
Rigola and Mariko Mori, conducted by Myung-Whun Chung, artist of the year in 2015 in Japan,
and recently the winner of the 2015 Abbiati Awards for his outstanding conducting of Simon
Boccanegra at La Fenice.
Finally, there are also two productions for a younger audience: Christoph Willibald
Gluck’s opera Le Cinesi and the world première of the “entomo-apocalyptic happy end opera” Il
ritorno dei chironomidi [The Return of the chironomids] by Giovanni Mancuso, which will be
staged at Teatro Malibran in collaboration with the Benedetto Marcello Music Conservatory.
Twelve of the eighteen productions will be put on at Teatro La Fenice, at times on alternate
days, five – the diptych Susanna’s Secret and Agenzia matrimoniale, Les Chevaliers de la Table
ronde, Le cinesi, Il ritorno dei chironomidi and Il medico dei pazzi – will be staged at Teatro
Malibran, while Cavalli’s Eliogabalo will be performed in the marvellous setting of one of the
rooms in the Doge's Palace. As usual, an unfailing date in the season is La Traviata, the opera that
symbolises Teatro La Fenice, with 34 performances in November, January, February, April, May,
June, September and October, some of which will be conducted by Myung-Whun Chung and Nello
Santi.
The 2015-2016 symphony season is called “Around Bruckner”, marking the 120th
anniversary of the composer’s death in Vienna in 1896; it includes 12 concerts from 4 December
2015 to 10 July 2016, coming to a total of 22 evenings with the repeat performances. The
programme focuses on the almost integral performance of the Austrian composer’s symphonies,
conducted by Jeffrey Tate (4 and 5 December, 21 and 23 April), Eliahu Inbal (26 and 27 February),
Michel Tabachnik (1 and 2 April), Yuri Temirkanov (15 and 16 April), Jonathan Webb (10 and 11
June) and Juraj Valčuha (8 and 10 July). Two of the twelve concerts will focus on sacred music,
with the Christmas Concert by the Soloists of the Cappella Marciana conducted by Marco Gemmani
(Saint Mark's Basilica, 17 and 18 December) and a special concert conducted by Myung-Whun
Chung and the Orchestra and Choir of Teatro La Fenice playing Gioachino Rossini's Stabat Mater
(25 March). On 28 April Teatro La Fenice will host one of the legs of the European tournée of the
Sveriges Radios Symfoniorkester (Symphony Orchestra of the Swedish Radio), conducted by
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Daniel Harding, with Concerto for violin and orchestra op. 77 and Symphony no. 2 op. 73 by
Johannes Brahms.
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