The eighth Bank of Valletta Opera Festival was launched yesterday at a news conference on the stage of the Manoel Theatre.
The Manoel Theatre’s Management Committee chairman, Wilfred Kenely, promised an opera bonanza of top quality performances from both local and foreign talent.
BOV chief executive officer Tonio Depasquale stressed the bank’s pride in being “the leading patron of arts and culture in Malta” and pointed out that this commitment stemmed from the bank’s community programme. Mr Depasquale also referred to the increasing popularity of the festival and recalled how he had been contacted by foreign opera enthusiasts who had been unable to obtain tickets for the festival.
The programme will begin with Giuseppe Verdi’s last opera, Falstaff, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. This will be performed on Wednesday, 14 March and Friday, 16 March. The production will be the first official collaboration between the national theatre and the Teatro Comunale Giuseppe Borgatti di Cento. Mro Michael Laus will conduct the National Orchestra while the choir, made up entirely of Maltese singers, will be under the direction of Mro Christopher Muscat.
On Sunday, 18 March, three operas will be staged: Domenico Cimarosa’s Il Maestro di Cappella, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s A Musical Joke. The productions will be staged at the auditorium of the Sacred Heart Convent in St Julian’s. John Gauci will be the director, while Mro Christopher Muscat will be the musical director.
The second major production will be Gaetano Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, which will be performed at the Manoel Theatre on Monday, 19 March and Wednesday, 21 March. The production of this opera is in collaboration with the Operaloboratorio from Palermo.
An interesting feature of this production is that Maltese tenor Charles Vincenti will perform the main role of Nemorino. Mr Vincenti has already rehearsed with the company in Palermo and will return to Sicily for further rehearsals in the coming weeks.
Mr Vincenti told The Malta Independent that he felt very honoured to be the only Maltese performer in the production. The other performers are all part of the Operalaboratorio and they live and breathe opera – a different reality to Mr Vincenti, as by profession he is an air steward with Air Malta. He is looking forward to his Nemorino debut, a role which has launched several other tenors.