Yesterday, 4th December, the board of directors of the Fondazione Teatro Donizetti appointed me as the new artistic director of the Donizetti Opera festival. It is an exceptional acknowledgement of the work I have been doing since 2017 as music director of the festival devoted to Donizetti,

The Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and I are about to set off on a tour which fills us with pride, in terms of destination (taking in eight important U.K. cities, including London, over a ten-day stay) and in terms of the programmes.

I am preparing to conduct Werther for the first time, the opera in four acts by librettists Édouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann, set to music by Jules Massenet after a difficult creation process followed by an equally complicated history of first performances.

On 28th October 1837, Roberto Devereux, an opera in three acts by Gaetano Donizetti to a libretto by Salvadore Cammarano, premiered at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples. This work, based on Jacques-François Ancelot’s tragedy Elisabeth d’Angleterre,