-The Italian conductor returns to the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona to conduct a concert with the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky and to the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées for a production of La Sonnambula directed by Rolando Villazón.

April 2021
After conducting Rigoletto at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino last February in a production directed by Davide Livermore which was recorded behind closed doors due to the current closure of theatres in Italy, and which will be broadcast soon via streaming, Riccardo Frizza returns to Barcelona in May to once again take the helm at the Symphony Orchestra of the Liceu on the 6th and 8th May. He will be conducting two performances of The Three Queens concert by the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, which includes the final scenes of Donizetti’s Tudor Trilogy (Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux). The show, which premiered at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2019, is directed by Rafael R. Villalobos, who has designed specific sets and wardrobe for each queen. Before this reunion with Sondra Radvanovsky, Frizza affirms that “it couldn’t occur to him” to think of “a better voice to take on a challenge of these characteristics” than the North American singer Radvonovsky, “as she knows how to submerge herself in the style, achieving a performance which, both from a vocal and a dramatic point of view, I would say is sublime”.
This staged concert should have premiered last December, but restrictions caused by the evolution of the pandemic at the time forced the Barcelona opera house to postpone it until the spring. “I feel very happy to return to the Liceu for the second time this season, after Les contes d’Hoffman last January. I feel at home in this theatre and I will be returning for interesting projects in the near future,” the Italian conductor concludes.
After his Barcelona engagement, the musical director of the Bergamo Donizetti Festival will return to Paris, this time to conduct Bellini’s La sonnambula at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on the 15th, 17th, 20th, 22nd, 24th and 26th June. He will be conducting the Paris Orchestre de Chambre and the Chœur de Radio France in a production directed by the tenor Rolando Villazón with a top flight cast, which includes the outstanding soprano Pretty Yende as Amina and Francesco Demuro in the role of Elvino.
In the summer Riccardo Frizza will give masterclasses organised by the Venice Biennale between 2nd and 11th July before returning to the Teatro San Carlo in Naples to conduct five performances of L’elisir d’amore on the 23rd, 25th, 27th, 29th and 31st of the same month.

The Italian conductor will be at the Barcelona opera house to conduct 10 performances of Offenbach’s opera, before moving on to more international engagements in Monte Carlo, Paris, Florence and Naples.

January 2021
After his work as musical director of the Donizetti Festival in Bergamo last November, a position he has held for three years, Riccardo Frizza will begin the year with engagements in Spain. This time he will be conducting the ten performances programmed by the Barcelona Gran Teatre del Liceu of Jacques Offenbach’s opera Les contes d’Hoffmann (18th, 19th, 20th, 21st, 25th, 26th, 28th, 30th and 31st of January and the 1st February). The Italian maestro will be conducting the Laurent Pelly 2013 Barcelona Liceu, Lyon Opéra National and San Francisco Opera production, which is surprising in its portrayal of the tortured poet Hoffmann’s vicissitudes. For Frizza, who conducted this opera for the first time in Vienna in 2012, “this is a fascinating piece, in which it is absolutely necessary to submerge oneself deeply in the libretto and get to know the texts – and their meaning – in order to be able to conduct it in a coherent way. This is a complex opera with many characters, which the composer left unfinished, being finally concluded by Ernest Giraud. Over the year it has had various modifications, which have led to different versions. In the Liceu we will perform what is considered to be the definitive version, which the musicologist Michael Kaye worked on in the 1990s. I met him in Miami and he told me some secrets which helped me to be able to conduct the opera for the first time,” the conductor explains.

Frizza will be at the helm of two alternating casts at the Liceu, including John Osborn and Arturo Chacón-Cruz as Hoffmann, Olga Pudova and Rocío Pérez (Olympia), Ermonela Jaho (Antonia), Nino Surguladze and Ginger Costa-Jackson (Giulietta), Marina Viotti and Carol García (Nicklausse) and Alexander Vinogradov and Roberto Tagliavini (Lindorf / Coppélius / Doctor Miracle / Capitán Dapertutto).

After this engagement at the Liceu, Riccardo Frizza will continue with his international engagements, conducting concerts with Joyce El-Khoury and Karine Deshayes at the Monte-Carlo Opera and at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, Rigoletto at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, La sonnambula once again at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and L’elisir d’amore at the San Carlo in Naples. In 2022, a highlight among other engagements is his return to the Metropolitan Opera in New York with Lucia di Lammermoor.