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Festival di Carnevale del Maggio

Soprano

Carolina López Moreno

Cio-Cio-San

Mezzo-soprano (+2)

Marvic Monreal

Suzuki

Baritone (+2)

Nicola Alaimo

Sharpless

Bass (+2)

Bozhidar Bozhkilov

Uncle Bonze

Baritone (+4)

Min Kim

Prince Yamadori

Conductor

Conductor (+4)

Daniele Gatti

Stage director

Lorenzo Mariani

Set designer

Alessandro Camera

Costume designer

Silvia Aymonino

Lighting designer

Lighting designer (+1)

Marco Filibeck

Chorusmaster

Chorusmaster (+2)

Lorenzo Fratini

Orchestra

Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Chorus

Coro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Bass (+1)

Egidio Massimo Naccarato

The official registrar

Baritone (+1)

Giovanni Mazzei

Uncle Yakusidé

Mezzo-soprano (+1)

Thalida Marina Fogarasi

The aunt

Soprano (+1)

Paola Leggeri

The cousin

Mezzo-soprano (+3)

Nadia Pirazzini

Cio-Cio San's mother

Tenor (+2)

Oronzo D'Urso

Goro

Elizaveta Shuvalova

Kate Pinkerton

Davide Sodini

The imperial commissioner

Tenor

Piero Pretti

B.F. Pinkerton

Vincenzo Costanzo

After the successes of Manon Lescaut, La bohème and Tosca, the time has come for Puccini to conquer the temple of Italian opera as well. The subject of Madama Butterfly - an opera which debuted with an initial failure at the Teatro alla Scala on February 17, 1904 - he had chosen himself after having witnessed a similar drama by David Belasco in London, based on a short story by John Luther Long. The story of the young geisha seduced and abandoned by an American naval officer immediately struck Puccini's imagination. With the librettists Illica and Giacosa, Puccini decided to focus the work on the figure of Cio-Cio-San, creating a real monodrama that follows her psychological evolutions from the initial and disarming naivety to the tragic and heroic final resignation. Madama Butterfly is an individual drama but it is also an emblem of opposed worlds and cultures: on the one hand the docile but at the same time resolute geisha, who will pay the price of her life for the mistake of falling in love with a man who is foreign to her tradition of belonging, and on the other hand the Yankee Pinkerton, the cynical adventurer unable to feel real emotions and devoted solely to the satisfaction of his passions. Although opposed in the drama, East and West are perfectly combined in the music that is very rich in heterogeneous contaminations: oriental sounds skillfully recreated with the adoption of traditional Japanese melodies, pentaphonic and hexagonal scales, very refined timbral combinations but also compositional elements of the Western musical tradition (such as the fugato or the Leitmotiv, for example, or the direct quotation of the American anthem).

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