Teatro Comunale di Bologna (Italy)
10, 11/10;Friday, Saturday;7:30pm, 8pm;Additional show: 9/10 (Thursday), 8pm
Dom Pedro V Theatre
Tickets: MOP 250, 200
Composer: Giovanni Battista Martini (1706-1784)
Production: Teatro Comunale di Bologna
Conductor: Paolo Mancini
Stage Director: Gabriele Marchesini
Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna
CHARACTERS AND CAST
Don Chisciotte Aldo Caputo, Tenor
Nerina Antonella Colaianni, Mezzo-soprano
Sancho Panza Matteo Belli (silent role)
In the wonderfully dramatic world of Baroque Opera, the Intermezzo was a short and comical operatic interlude performed between acts or scenes of a theatrical play or serious opera. The Franciscan monk Giovanni Battista Martini was one of the leading proponents of this genre. Padre Martini lived and worked in Bologna, and he counted Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Christian Bach amongst his students.
In his famous 1605 novel Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes beautifully defined the character of his anti-hero. “Through too little sleep and too much reading of books on knighthood, he dried up his brains in such a way that he wholly lost his judgment. His fantasy was filled with those things that he read, of enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wooing, loves, storms…“ Not surprisingly, composers of all eras have translated this story of the tragic hero into the universal language of music. Giovanni Battista Martini composed his setting, simply entitled Don Chisciotte (Don Quixote) in 1746. Martini takes Cervantes’s novel as his starting point and musically depicts the Don mercilessly mocked by a spiteful Sancho Panza. Always the social and cultural critic, Martini essentially pokes fun at the rigid musical conventions of the 18th century. Don’t miss the spectacular production of this riveting intermezzo by the Teatro Comunale di Bologna!
Please refer to the Festival Outreach Programme
Performed in Italian, with surtitles in Chinese, Portuguese and English
Duration: approximately 50 minutes, no interval
