The passions of verismo and unheard instrumental works in an Italian concert narrative. At the musical centre of the programme is the secular woman of Italian melodrama and her refined and complex emotional world, both in interaction with her eternal antagonist—the man—and in her own right. Alongside pages from Puccini’s operatic music, the concert will feature in Latvia rarely heard instrumental works by the Italian composer and Romantic Saverio Mercadante, Puccini’s contemporary Alfredo Casella, Ottorino Respighi, and the 20th-century composer Nino Rota, written for flute, harp, and piano.
The concert features soprano Anta Jankovska, Italian tenor Nico Franchini, flutist Dita Krenberga, harpist Dārta Tisenkopfa-Muselli, and pianist Rihards Plešanovs. The narrator is Orests Silabriedis, and Ivars Vācers is the lighting director.