The artists were selected out of 181 candidates who auditioned for the 7th Opera (e)Studio

 

After finishing the auditions held in Bologna, Tbilisi, Madrid and Tenerife, Ópera de Tenerife has revealed the names of the artists who will make up the double cast for Gaetano Donizetti‘s L’elisir d’amore, which will open the 2019-2020 season. This title is part of the project by Opera(e)Studio in partnership with Teatro Comunale di Bologna and Tbilisi Opera and Ballet State Theatre, which in this edition is sponsored by the European Community’s Creative Europe programme.

The double cast includes Maria Rita Combattelli and Beatriz de Sousa as Adina, Klodjan Kaçani and César Arrieta as Nemorino, Alberto Bonifazio and Jacobo Ochoa as Belcore, Givi Gigineishvili and Matteo Andrea Mollica as Dulcamara and Sofía Esparza and Eleonora Boaretto as Giannetta.

This year 181 artists from 33 different American, European and Asian countries have taken part in the auditions. The cast includes ten artists from seven different nationalities: Albanese, Colombian, Spanish, Georgian, Italian, Portuguese and Venezuelan. All the auditions were supervised by Giulio Zappa, artistic director of the programme.

The selected singers will be travelling to Tenerife in early September to benefit from comprehensive professional training in all the disciplines related to opera. The artists will work on different musical and stage performance techniques, style, diction, body language, theatrical nature of the role, historical context of the composition, dramaturgy, or libretto studying, among other aspects. Their work will lead to the performance of Donizetti‘s classic L’elisir d’amore, on 24, 25, 26 and 27 October 2019 at Ópera de Tenerife; it will be put on at Tbilisi Opera and Ballet State Theatre on 25, 27, 29 February, and 1 March 2020 and at Teatro Comunale di Bologna on April 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11, 2020.

Ópera (e)Studio is a programme set up by Ópera de Tenerife in 2013 with the aim of boosting young talent through comprehensive artistic improvement. Its permanent base is at Auditorio de Tenerife, and in the past six years it has staged Così fan tutte [2013], La Cenerentola [2014], Le nozze di Figaro [2015], Don Pasquale [2016], I Capuleti e i Montecchi [2017] and L’italiana in Algeri [2018].

L’elisir d’amore is Donizetti’s highly popular opera buffa and it includes the most famous aria for tenor ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ in addition to a lively plot where the love troubles of beautiful Adina and gullible Nemorino meet with the ploys of trickster Dulcamara and Sargeant Belcore’s jealousy.

Stage director Pablo Maritano is in charge of the production’s stage design, which is inspired by the golden age of cinema. A fantasy world through different Hollywood film sets of that era.

The musical direction of this opera is under the baton of Antonio Méndez, principal conductor of Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife.