This concert celebrates Opera Fuoco’s latest recoding and featuring three former members of Opera Fuoco’s Young Artists Studio and the Opera Fuoco orchestra conducted by David Stern. Berenice is a compilation of late baroque and early Classical works based principally on Metastasio’s famous 18th-century opera scene « Ah Berenice » from his opera Antigono.
Not only was the scene set to music by such composers as Haydn and Hasse, but also by Antonio Maria Mazzoni and Marianna Martinez, a composer of Spanish descent who was widely connected to the Viennese music scene and, for a time, lived in the same noble house as Metastasio and Haydn at Grosse Michelstrasse. The young Mozart’s concert aria « Berenice » and Johann Christian Bach’s aria « Confusa, smarrita» from the composer’s lost pasticcio opera, Berenice, as well as Hasse’s Antigono overture complement the program.
If Verdi had spent too many summers sipping rosé wine on the French riviera he might very well had composed Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. Quintessentially gallic, this work weaves beautifully melodies into the infamous tale and evokes the melancholy aspects of the story more than the heroic.
Returning to China for the first time since the pandemic, David Stern joins the MISA festival to conduct the wonderful Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and present Rino Yoshimoro, a new talent and one of the six finalists of the 2020/22 Shanghai Isaac Stern International Violon Competition.