Czech troupe to perform Donizetti at Manoel

Two performances of Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor will be held at the Manoel Theatre on March 17 and 19.

The Silesian National Opera from the city of Opava in the Czech Republic will present the opera.

The masterpiece premiered in Naples in 1835. The Bergamasque composer Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) wrote 64 operas and left an unfinished one (Le Duc d’Albe) before ill-health immobilised him for the last five years of his life.

He wrote operas in every genre, and Lucia di Lammermoor was his 46th opera and is the most popular of his serious stage works.

Together with his comic operas L’elisir d’amore (1832) and Don Pasquale (1842), they are his most frequently performed operas.

This opera is typical of the bel canto era of Italian opera, epitomised by the works of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti.

In post-Napoleonic Europe, the Romantic movement in drama and literature was often reflected in opera.

Italian composers found a lot of inspiration mainly in the literary works of foreign authors and a very rich and much-sapped source were the works of Britain’s Sir Walter Scott and France’s Victor Hugo. Scott’s works fascinated Donizetti and his Italian contemporaries no less.

This production won the prestigious Thalia Prize in 2005, under the musical direction of Damiano Binetti and artistic director Jana Andelova Pletichova. Both will conduct and direct the performances at the Manoel.

The same soprano who first sang the title role, Katarina Jorda Kramolisova, will be singing it in Malta as well. The cast includes Korean tenor Kim Kisun in the role of Lucia’s lover Edgardo of Ravenswood; baritone Jakob Kettner as Enrico Ashton, Lucia’s ruthless and ambitious brother; bass Dalibor Hrda as Bide-the-bent (also known as Raimondo), the Presbyterian minister; tenor Michal Pavel Vojta as the hapless Sir Arturo Bucklaw, Lucia’s husband whom she kills during their wedding night, and soprano Ilona Kaplova as Alisa, Lucia’s confidante. They will be performing with the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra.

For tickets, e-mail bookings@teatrumanoel.com.mt, call 2124 6389, or visit www.teatrumanoel.com.mt.