Tenor Lawrence Brownlee and Opera Rara’s Artistic Director, the conductor and pianist Carlo Rizzi, join for an exclusive London concert featuring songs by Gaetano Donizetti and his contemporaries as part of the 225th anniversary of the former’s birth. The recital, at Wigmore Hall on 9 September, is also the launch of an exploration of Donizetti’s song repertoire, which is rarely performed in modern times.
Opera Rara’s multi-year Donizetti Song Project will see the recording and performance of the composer’s nearly 200 solo songs.
Opera Rara writes:
“Donizetti is currently known for a mere 10-15 solo songs with piano. These are frequently performed and enjoyed; but recent research by Roger Parker, Opera Rara’s Repertoire Consultant and an internationally known expert on Donizetti, has revealed that the composer wrote nearly 200 such songs, a great many of them completely unknown. In the Donizetti Song Project, Opera Rara plans to create a new edition of the songs and then record them in eight individual albums. This ambitious programme will include live performances by the internationally renowned artists featured on each album, as well as a ‘salon’ series for emerging artists. The Donizetti Song Project, one of the most ambitious in Opera Rara’s 50-year history, aims to add a substantial body of work to the solo song repertoire through recordings and performances, making a claim that Donizetti is one of the genre’s most significant composers in the nineteenth century.”
For more information on the concert, please visit wigmore-hall.org.uk
For more information on Opera Rara’s Donizetti Song Project, please visit opera-rara.com.
Photo credits: Lawrence Brownlee – Shervin Lainez; Carlo Rizzi – Tessa Traeger
