With this performance of Don Carlo, Željko Lučić earned the title of one of the most significant Verdi baritones in the world, points out the Financial Times after the performance of Verdi's opera La forza del destino at the San Francisco Opera. This is confirmed by the series of operatic roles in Verdi's operas that he was specially invited to sing on the 200th anniversary of Verdi's birth, as well as the fact that out of 120 performances in the Metropolitan's productions, 90 were in 7 Verdi roles, which were mostly broadcast directly by Met Live in HD . He played roles in Verdi's Macbeth, La Traviata, Rigoletto, Simon Boccanegra, Otello, Crab Dance, Troubadour, Nabucco, and in the productions of the world's most important opera houses such as: Metropolitan Opera, Wiener Staatsoper, Staatsoper Dresden, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Teatro alla Scala, Bayerische Staatsoper and Opera Paris. It should also be noted the performances in the roles of Puccini's triptych: Plašt and Gianni Schicchi. In his exceptional singing career, he collaborated with numerous top artists and conductors, including Riccardo Muti, James Levine, Fabio Luisi and Antonio Pappano, and with directors such as the famous Jean Luc Bondy and David McVicar. In 2018, he has new roles ahead of him: Alfio in Cavalleria rusticani at the Metropolitan, performances in the operas Rigoletto in Dresden, Simon Boccanegra and Scarpiain Munich, Rigoletto in Frankfurt, Machbeth in the Vienna State Opera and Covent Garden, Troubadour in Paris. In 2019, he is expected to play Iago and Macbeth at the Metropolitan, Germont at the Lyric Opera in Chicago, André Chénier at Covent Garden and a role in Aida in Dresden in 2020. This exceptional singing career began with an overwhelming victory at the Francisco Viñas International Competition in Barcelona in 1997, which earned him a ten-year engagement at the Frankfurt Opera. Lučić also performed a number of concert performances in collaboration with numerous world orchestras, including a performance with the Zagreb Philharmonic at the closing of the jubilee 65th Dubrovnik Summer Festival in 2014, and, thanks to the Zagreb performance, will also join the listCroatian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra . The performance in the Lisinski Arioso cycle will be directed by mo. Ivo Lipanović , who has been performing abroad for over twenty years, conducts operas and orchestras in Verona, Seoul, Nice, Berlin, Ankara, Paris, Messina... He is a conductor who approaches performances of both concert and opera repertoire wholeheartedly. Because as he himself says: It is an old story according to which symphony and opera conductors exist. I persistently deny this, I do not admit it and I will never admit it, because music is one and all.
