2023 Donizetti Opera Festival

These are the titles of the 2023 festival, which will be held from 16 November to 3 December: LU OpeRave, Il diluvio universale, Alfredo il Grande, Lucie de Lammermoor and Il piccolo compositore di musica.

The three weekends will therefore open (16, 23 and 30 November) with the new LU OpeRave creation (initially planned for 2022) in which Donizetti’s music meets electronics and new trends. The title recalls Donizetti’s most famous opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, from which the authors of this new experimental project drew inspiration. The show will take place in an unconventional city location, with space for conviviality and the audience as an integral part of the performance.

The first operatic title at the Donizetti Theatre on 17 and 25 November and 3 December, will be Il diluvio universale (Naples, 1830) a tragic-sacred opera scheduled following the new critical edition by Edoardo Cavalli for the Donizetti Theatre Foundation.

For the #donizetti200 cycle, with which the festival stages a Donizetti title that turns two centuries old, we will have the heroic opera Alfredo il Grande (Naples, 1823) at the Donizetti Theatre on 19 and 24 November, with a new edition based on the opera’s sources, edited again by Edoardo Cavalli.

The third title, at the Teatro Sociale on 18 and 26 November and then on 1 December, will be Lucie de Lammermoor, which premiered at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris in 1839 and was received with such acclaim that Donizetti was commissioned to write two new operas for that theatre, the first of which was to be L’Ange de Nisida.

The fifth production of the festival will be Il piccolo compositore di musica, Saturday 2 December at the Donizetti Theatre, an azione teatrale in two acts by Johann Simon Mayr. Francesco Micheli will stage the production with the students of Bottega Donizetti as part of a project involving several Bergamo educational institutions.