Just over a year after ‘the three queens’ concerts, in which I presented the project with the finales from the Tudor trilogy, I’m back at the Teatro di San Carlo to conduct Donizetti again. This time it’s Anna Bolena, in the production by Jetske Mijnssen, co-produced by the Naples opera house, the Dutch National Opera and the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía. We’ll be on stage on 8/11/14/17 June, and the first performance is dedicated to the Maria Callas centenary celebrations.

Anna Bolena was Donizetti’s first great triumph and not only that: it was also his first real work as a composer of tragedies after a series of compositions almost exclusively devoted to the comic genre.

The score’s elevated, elegant style is a great challenge for performers. In Anna Bolena, Donizetti draws out the scenes in length, with complex, elaborate forms culminating, thanks to Romani’s admirable libretto, in true romantic catharsis. The grand final scene highlights how Donizetti, elaborating its structures starting from conventional ones, finds the most profound expression which had eluded him on his previous attempts.

On 22 May, anniversary of Manzoni’s death, after readings of chapters XX and XXI of The Betrothed, I will conduct the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano and the Coro Sinfonico di Milano in the “Verdi Requiem”, with soloists Serena Farnocchia, Anna Maria Chiuri, Luciano Ganci and Luiz-Ottavio Faria.

The concert, promoted and organised by the Milanese section of the Istituto Nazionale per la storia del Risorgimento in Italia in conjunction with the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo and the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano, will take place thanks to sponsorship by the Fondazione Per Milano.

The concert will be broadcast live on Duomo Milano TV with a repeat on 29 May on Classica HD (Sky, Channel 136).

Conducting the Verdi Requiem is always an exceptional challenge, not just from a musical perspective, but because the Requiem is the start of Verdi’s spiritual journey which was to continue up until his late Pezzi sacri. We know that Verdi had worshipped Manzoni from a young age, even though the two were to meet only in 1867. This gives us an understanding of how deeply the composer was affected by the death of Manzoni who had shared his commitment to the Unification of Italy and the Risorgimento values of freedom and justice. As a result, it was Manzoni’s death which persuaded Verdi to revive the old project, involving several composers, for a Requiem to commemorate Rossini, for which he had composed the final section, Libera me Domine. The Rossini project, which failed for many different reasons to come to fruition, had clearly been only the start and not the end of the “Requiem” project, which Verdi eventually concluded and gifted to the city of Milan.  He himself conducted it on the first anniversary of Manzoni’s death, 22 May 1874, at the Chiesa di San Marco in Milan. It was an enormous success and the work’s fame spread outside Italy. For all these reasons, independently of the worth of the Requiem itself, for which my critical reflections are unnecessary, I consider this performance for Manzoni 150 to be an honour bestowed on me as a musician, and as a citizen of Lombardy and of Italy.