Giovanni Battista Rubini News
Italian opera singer (1794-1854)
Commemorations 2024 (Birth: Giovanni Battista Rubini)
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2024-04-24
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2021-01-15 08:24:34
Donizetti on the cusp: never a success in his lifetime, Opera Rara reveals much to enjoy in the composer's 1829 opera Il Paria
Donizetti Il Paria; Albina Shagimuratova, René Barbera, Misha Kiria, Marko Mimica, Britten Sinfonia, Sir Mark Elder; Opera Rara Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 13 January 2021 Star rating: 4.5 (★★★★½) Despite its weak dramaturgy, there is music of richness and daring in an opera written a year before Donizetti's first big success12 January 1829 was a big day for Gaetano Donizetti. Aged 32, he was making his debut as Director of the Royal Theatres in Naples, a post previously held by Rossini (until 1822), with the premiere of Il Paria (something like his 29th opera). It wasn't Donizetti's first opera for Naples, but Il Paria would be the first one written as Director. Royal protocol ensured that the reaction to the first night was muted, but the opera only lasted for a few performances despite the starry cast (Adelaide Tosi, Giovanni Rubini and Luigi Lablache) and was never revived. […]
2020-06-27 08:31:54
Renowned as a pedagogue & the Royal Academy of Music's first cello professor, there is a lot more to Alfredo Piatti: I chat to cellist Adrian Bradbury about rediscovering Piatti's forgotten operatic fantasies
[…] were rehearsing Piatti's Souvenir de la Sonnambula (based on Vincenzo Bellini's opera La Sonnambula), Oliver made Adrian go an listen to Bellini's opera live at Covent Garden (though familiar with the work, Adrian had never heard it live as an audience member). And Adrian found that he learned a lot by hearing singers performing the music and understood that that is what Piatti and his contemporaries would have done. The great Italian tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini was a good friend of Piatti's and in fact Piatti knew all of the so-called 'Puritani Quartet', the four leading singers of their day who had premiered Bellini's I Puritani in 1835, Giulia Grisi, Antonio Tamburini, Luigi Lablache and Rubini. Autograph manuscript of Alfredo Piatti's Parafrasi sulla Barcarola del Marino Faliero ©️Annalisa Barzanò It has always bothered Adrian why the operatic fantasy form went out of fashion so quickly, […]
2019-03-17 11:47:00
Anglais - An operatic wordsmith: Luca Salsi's excellent La Scala recital
Luca Salsi has a special way with words. His Macbeth sends shivers down the spine; his noble Giorgio Germonts fills you with warmth. Such portrayals works so well because Salsi can craft colour, nuance and meaning into a line like few others today. How fitting, then, that Salsi should provide a La Scala recital programme that read like a homage to Italian verse. In doing so, Salsi confirmed himself the foremost wordsmith of the opera world. On the world’s largest opera stages the towering Luca Salsi dominates. But here at La Scala he toned things down, reducing the stage’s vast dimensions by drawing the listener in. We might as well have been sitting in Salsi’s living room, so comfortably at home did he appear. Salsi would sometimes take a couple of steps forward to engage more directly, and communication was always at a maximum, the baritone more often fixing his […]
2018-01-22 08:28:16
Chants d'amour: Louise Alder & James Baillieu at the Wigmore Hall
[…] to it as intensity grew. C'est l'extase was also slow build, with a lovely ease in the seductive details. Alder and Baillieu made each song flow fluidly, with a nice suppleness of line, but I would have liked Alder to dig into the text more, to make the poetry count as much as the music.Franz Liszt's Three Petrarch Sonnets were written for tenor and piano, in fact the greatest tenor of the age Giovanni Batista Rubini. Rubini was renowned for his performances of Bellini and Donizetti, and Liszt's songs are arias in everything but name, channelling Liszt's elaboration of the style of Bellini. I have to confess to finding the transposition to female voice a little unsatisfactory, the pieces really do seem to explore the very particular high intensity of the high tenor register. In Pace non trovo Alder and Baillieu started well, with a particularly strong recitative, and when […]
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