In 10 years the BOV Opera Festival has established itself on the local music cultural calendar as an eagerly anticipated event, both locally and internationally, Igino Xuereb, chief operations officer of Bank of Valletta, said yesterday.

Speaking during the launch of the BOV Opera Festival, Mr Xuereb said that collaborating on an “important operatic event” of such calibre with the Manoel Theatre made them proud, and they were confident this would be a success.

Manoel Theatre chairman Peter Fenech said that together with music director and consultant Brian Schembri, the board of the Manoel was working towards a long term project, aimed at developing a professionally efficient production organisation.

This year’s festival, to be held between 17 and 24 March, promises to be a memorable one for opera lovers, with performances ranging from Rossini and Rachmaninoff to Handel and Puccini. There has already been considerable foreign interest, Dr Fenech said.

The Manoel Theatre is making the most of local talent in this year’s event, which is something that may have been overlooked and underused in previous years. For this to bear fruit, Dr Fenech said, they are engaging in intensive development of the existent potential and reforming production know-how on all levels.

The aim of the theatre is to improve its capacity to serve as a platform for high quality artists to launch their career. In the case of opera, as in this case, this may be the first opportunity to take on a principal role for a singer, and in the future, hopefully also for stage directors, conductors, repetiteurs, and designers and similar roles.

Such aims, Dr Fenech said, had to be built around a careful choice of repertoire, which should fall in line with the historic qualities of the location, and therefore its physical limitations.

As has proved successful in the past, the Manoel Theatre will once again be soliciting the expertise of local and international collaborators. A cast of 11 soloists was engaged for the production of Rossini’s La Cambiale di Matrimonio and Rachmaninov’s Aleko.

Although mostly local, the cast includes Enrico Marabelli, an Italian bass-baritone enjoying an international reputation.

A thirty-member choir made up of local choristers, professionals from the Varna State Opera Theatre in Bulgaria, dancers, and the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra will also be participating.

The production team will also benefit from the services of German opera stage director Angelika Frenzel and her colleague, set and costume designer Hanne Eckart. Music director will be Brian Schembri and the production manager Sara Spiteri.

A system of subtitles will also be introduced for the first time in Manoel Theatre productions, after last year’s experience with the Arcal production of Riders to the Sea, which included partial segments of projected text as part of the visual effects.

This year the festival will unite two of the Manoel Theatre’s most important musical vocations, Malta’s foremost and most prestigious music venue for chamber music and an exciting platform for the creation of a durable and high quality base of opera production.

The mid-week programme promises an extremely interesting concert, which will give opera aficionados the chance to listen to works by the world’s favourite opera composers in a totally different genre, that of chamber music.

One of Malta’s best local ensembles, the Anon String quartet led by Marcelline Agius, will perform chamber music composed by Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini, and Respighi together with two of Malta’s most illustrious composers, Paolo Nani and Carmelo Pace.

These, together with soprano Gillian Zammit, will add even more refinement to this festival in showing the mastery of these great opera composers in action in a genre, which has always been the “sine qua non” of the refined and demanding music lover.

The last event will be a production of Handel’s Alcina by ‘Daphne Music Vienna’, who will come over from Austria to Malta complete with costumes, singers, conductor, orchestra and baroque instruments.

This major work is a case in point of historic location, cultural awareness, artistic excellence, entertainment and visionary ideals uniting in what can be called a promising enthusiastic journey of adventure towards a culturally rich and creatively healthy future.