It marks the conductor’s debut Michele Mariotti on the podium of the Wiener Staatsoper the new production of Barber of Seville from Gioachino Rossini, on stage from 28 September to 14 October 2021. Mariotti, which should have made its debut at the Vienna State Opera in 2020 with a resumption of Guillaume Tell, followed by a new staging of the Masked ball – both canceled due to the health emergency – he is now conducting for the first time in the most famous Austrian theater. The production features a first-rate cast led by the Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Florez in the role of the Count of Almaviva. The French-Canadian baritone is engaged on stage with him Étienne Dupuis in the title role, the Russian mezzo Vasilisa Berzhanskaya like Rosina, the bass-baritone Paolo Bordogna in the part of Don Bartolo and the Russian bass Ildar Abdrazakov in that of Don Basilio.

The Wiener Staatsoper – which proposes a new staging of the Barber of Seville 55 years after the historic show by Günther Rennert – entrusts the unprecedented production to a German director such as Herbert Fritsch and to an Italian conductor like Mariotti, already appreciated in Austria, at the Salzburg Festival in 2017 for The two Foscari by Verdi. They sign costumes and lights respectively Victoria Behr And Carsten Sander.

Mariotti says about Rossini’s comic opera, taken from the comedy of the same name by Beaumarchais: “The Barber of Seville it is an ideal bridge between the Commedia dell’arte and the comic opera, but it does not identify with either of the two, on the contrary it marks its overcoming. This is why we are faced with a masterpiece that still continues to surprise us. The musical material of the Barber shop it is so heterogeneous as to make the subject almost a series of paintings on display, all with different colors, contrasting atmospheres and musical situations never heard before. We laugh of course – continues the director – and we smile, but we often forget that situations with non-funny characters are also funny: two men who plan the destruction of the enemy; a girl who, before giving herself, wants to be sure of the status of her beloved; a ‘self-made-man’ who only makes trouble and the rich man who silences everything with power ».

The work will be broadcast by the Austrian national radio and television ORF both on the radio on 28 September at 19.00 on Radio Ö1, and on television on 9 October at 20.15 in the main evening program of ORF 2 (also visible in South Tyrol through the RAS television channel and throughout Europe through ORF 2 Europe). ARTE will broadcast the show on November 28 and will stream on the ARTE Concert online platform starting that day.

after Barber shop – the opera with which he made his professional debut in 2005 – Mariotti will direct Simon Boccanegra in the form of a concert at the Verdi Festival in Parma with the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna e Othello by Verdi for the inauguration of the season of the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples (with Jonas Kaufmann and directed by Mario Martone). Starting from the 2022/2023 season he will be the Musical Director of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma.

Further information: www.wiener-staatsoper.at

Photo: Michael Poehn