Opera Rara to launch Donizetti Song Project

Opera company and recording label Opera Rara will next month launch its Donizetti Song Project at London's Wigmore Hall. Launching with a performance by tenor Lawrence Brownlee (pictured above) and Opera Rara artistic director Carlo Rizzi on 9 September, the multi-year project will see all of Donizetti’s almost 200 solo songs performed and recorded.

The project launch, which will include three world premieres of Donizetti’s works, forms part of Opera Rara’s year-long celebration of Donizetti’s 225^th birthday. The project is curated by Opera Rara repertoire consultant Roger Parker, who has worked for the last two years to find manuscripts of Donizetti’s songs in archives and collections worldwide. His new edition of the Donizetti solo songs, published with Casa Ricordi, will be made publicly available over the next two years.

In a recent interview Parker said: ‘It’s an amazing collection of songs, of which a large number are entirely new… some may have been published once in the 19th century but have never been performed in modern times, but there are many that have literally never, ever been played since the 19th century. Very often, Donizetti would write a song in an evening and give it to a friend as a present. In this way, the manuscripts got dispersed all over the place.’     

The launch concert programme includes some of these far-flung discoveries, including Lunge ne vai, which was found in the Naples Conservatory Library; Non v’è più barbaro, discovered in an Austrian monastery; and O anime, an unfinished setting of part of Dante’s Inferno which was found in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.

The Donizetti Song Project will also include a series of twelve 'Salon Concerts' for emerging artists and eight album releases featuring international singers including Opera Rara artist ambassadors Ermonela Jaho and Michael Spyres.

The creation of a Donizetti collection was a dream of Opera Rara founders Patric Schmid and Don White when they launched the opera company in 1970. In May, Opera Rara premiered L’esule di Roma, its 27^th complete opera by Donizetti.