Vincenzo Bellini’s The Puritans at the Modena Belcanto Festival

MODENA, 08 MAY – A tribute to bel canto, which the newborn Modena Belcanto Festival is in its entirety, could not fail to pass through one of the key titles, almost a standard-bearer, of this repertoire: the opera I puritani, Vincenzo Bellini’s latest masterpiece scheduled at the Teatro Comunale Pavarotti-Freni on 10 and 12 May. The opera will be proposed in the staging by Francesco Esposito, author of direction and costumes, with the scenes designed by Rinaldi Rinaldi and Maria Grazia Cervetti and with the lights by Andrea Ricci. Alessandro d’Agostini will be on the podium of the Philharmonic of the Teatro Comunale of Modena and of the Modena Lyric Choir instructed by Giovanni Farina. The cast includes the tenor Ruzil Gatin playing Arturo for the first time; by soprano Ruth Iniesta as Elvira; by Alessandro Luongo as Riccardo, also making his debut in the role; Nozomi Kato will sing the role of Henriette of France. I puritani represents the apotheosis of bel canto in the strict sense of the term, with its expansive lyricism, the care in the construction of the melody, the search for the purity of the sound, in a dramaturgical frame against the background of the English history of the seventeenth century, at the time of fights between followers of Cromwell and partisans of the Stuarts. At the first performance, at the Théâtre de la Comédie italienne in Paris on 24 January 1835, the success was sensational: it is said that at the famous scene of madness the whole theater was moved to tears, while on “Sound the trumpet and intrepid” he had an explosion of patriotic fanaticism. Little frequented in the billboards of opera theatres, precisely because of the technical difficulties inherent in vocal writing, this title has always attracted the greatest singers of all time, including Mirella Freni and Luciano Pavarotti, to whom the Modena theater is now named . (HANDLE).