After its baptism at the Festival Verdi in September 2023 with the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro Comunale, Il trovatore according to Davide Livermore also arrives on the Bologna stage. The performance, co-produced with the Teatro Regio in Parma, is staged at the Comunale Nouveau starting Sunday 18 February at 6 p.m. – also broadcast live on Rai Radio3 – with replicas until Sunday 25 February.
On the podium is Renato Palumbo, at the helm of a cast featuring Roberto Aronica as Manrico, Marta Torbidoni as Leonora, Lucas Meachem as Conte di Luna and Chiara Mogini as Azucena, who alternate – for the performance on 21 February only – with Zi-Zhao Guo, Federica Vitali, Angelo Veccia and Cristina Melis. Completing the vocal ensemble are Gianluca Buratto (Ferrando), Benedetta Mazzetto (Ines) and Cristiano Olivieri (Ruiz). The Orchestra and Chorus – prepared by Gea Garatti Ansini – are those of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna.
“When I prepare a direction,” says Livermore, “I always start from a maniacal study: I start from the libretto and in the case of Il Trovatore from the beautiful story by Salvadore Cammarano: it is our time but also an elsewhere, it is a dystopian contemporaneity in which the gypsies exist, they are merrymakers and circus performers and often live under the overpasses of our bypasses on which we speed along in our cars without even realising that beneath us pulses a life removed by a society that no longer knows how to observe the territory, but lives time only through virtual or fake logics’. The director – who from 2018 to 2021 signed the stagings for four consecutive openings of the Teatro alla Scala – now returns to collaborate with the Comunale after Idomeneo in 2010 and Il turco in Italia in 2017. In the creative team alongside him is Carlo Sciaccaluga, who takes over the direction of Il Trovatore in Bologna, Giò Forma who takes care of the sets, D-Wok the videos, Anna Verde the costumes and Antonio Castro the lights.
A Knight of the Italian Republic for artistic merits, who made his conducting debut at only 19 years of age with this Verdi title, of which he has directed about 300 performances to date, Palumbo is at his second Trovatore with the Bologna opera-symphonic foundation after the 2012 one directed by Paul Curran.
A famous page of the ‘Popular Trilogy’, composed after Rigoletto and before Traviata, the lyrical drama in four parts and eight scenes from Antonio García-Gutiérrez’s El trovador, with a libretto by Salvadore Cammarano, was performed at the Teatro Apollo in Rome on 19 January 1853 to enormous success.
Each character in Il Trovatore tells a story, mixing nobles and outcasts, superstition and violence, touching on the dark sides of feelings.
Presenting Partner of the show, and once again close to the Theatre, is Alfasigma.
The performances will be preceded – about 45 minutes before they begin – by a short presentation of the opera in the Foyer of the Comunale Nouveau.
Tickets – ranging from €25 to €150 – are on sale online via Vivaticket and at the Teatro Comunale ticket office, open Tuesday to Friday from 12 noon to 6 p.m., on Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Largo Respighi, 1); on performance days at the Comunale Nouveau (Piazza della Costituzione, 4) from an hour before and up to 15 minutes after the start.
