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.
For the third program with NDR Hannover, David Stern will conduct the rarely produced gem of Adolph Hasse, Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra, with two of the most innovative singers of today, Sarah Hershkowitz and Fleur Barron.
Tosca is a violent and turbulent story that exposes the kind of raw emotional content that defines verismo, the style that urges opera to connect completely to credible, real life situations.