Opera Rara announce 2024/25 season of live operatic archaeology
We’re delighted to announce our 2024/25 season of live operatic archaeology featuring performances and recording releases celebrating the past made new. Gaetano Donizetti, whose music we’ve returned to time and again since our founding in 1970, is the main focal point of this new season with further recitals and first recording releases as part of our Donizetti Song Project which launched in September 2023. Spearheaded by our Artistic Director Carlo Rizzi, and curated by our Repertoire Consultant Roger Parker, the multi-year initiative will see us collaborate with some of the world’s greatest singers to record and perform Donizetti’s entire corpus of solo songs, nearly 200 in total, many of which have never been heard before.
On 23 May and 2 November 2024, we continue our ‘Donizetti & Friends’ cycle at Wigmore Hall with Artist Ambassador Ermonela Jaho followed by Rosa Feola, both accompanied by Carlo Rizzi at the piano. On 10 March 2025, we return to Cadogan Hall to celebrate the launch of our recording releases with Artist Ambassador Michael Spyres and Marie-Nicole Lemieux with a recital of French songs written in the last 5 years of Donizetti’s life. These recordings released a month prior (February 2025) to the Cadogan Hall concert, follow the first two album releases in our Donizetti Song Project recording cycle available from 27 September 2024 featuring tenor songs with Lawrence Brownlee, and baritone songs with Nicola Alaimo.
Alongside our mainstage recitals, our Salon Series for emerging singers this new season includes an exploration of songs composed by women in Europe during the 19th-century. Denied the same compositional and commissioning opportunities as their male peers, it was within the intimate settings of salon concerts, often presented at home, that songs written by women were performed and celebrated. Presenting four recitals in total, this season’s featured artists will be Katia Ledoux (10 June 2024) and Lluís Calvet i Pey, both of whom recently made their recording debuts with us in Offenbach’s La Princesse de Trébizonde (ORC63, Best Opera Recording at OPER! Awards 2024) and Donizetti’s L’esule di Roma (ORC64); Jessica Robinson, who represented Wales in the 2023 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition; and Ellie Neate, a recent graduate from the Guidlhall School of Music and Drama.
Our full-scale opera production for the 2024/25 season will be the revival of the original 1857 version of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra with The Hallé and our former Artistic Director Sir Mark Elder. Edited by Roger Parker for Casa Ricordi, this new edition of the opera is the first to be based on Verdi’s original autograph score which only recently became available to scholars. A week prior to our performance on 18 April 2024 at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, we will commit the original Simon Boccanegra to disc for the first time ever under studio conditions for release in March 2025. Nicola Alaimo, who appears in our latest release of Donizetti’s L’esule di Roma, takes up the title role and is joined by Eleonora Buratto as Amelia and William Thomas as Jacopo Fiesco, both making their Opera Rara debuts. Iván Ayón-Rivas returns to Opera Rara as Gabriele Adorno following his first collaboration with us in Mercadante’s Il proscritto (ORC62), which won the 2023 International Opera Award for Best Complete Opera Recording.
In addition to our performances and recording releases, we launch our new Discovery Programme, open to Friends and Patrons, which will give our supporters first-hand, behind the scenes experiences to connect them to all aspects of our work and operatic archaeology. This new season will also see the launch of Ask Opera Rara, a new initiative where members of the public can send in their operatic questions to us and its team of musicological experts.