The Barber of Seville

or The Useless Precaution

(Il barbiere di Siviglia, ossia L'inutile precauzione)

April 25, 2009, 7:00 PM

April 26, 2009, 3:00 PM

Stars  |  Conductor  |  Director  |  Full Cast  |  Opera Story   |  Composer Bio

Stars

	JOYCE DiDONATO Rosina Among the world’s most charismatic performers, Joyce DiDonato consistently earns ecstatic reviews wherever she sings. “The buoyant progress of DiDonato’s career has been one of the happiest opera events of the past decade,” states Opera News magazine. Born and educated in Kansas, the dynamic and engaging mezzo-soprano was a member of the young artist programs of the San Francisco, Houston Grand, and Santa Fe Opera companies after graduate studies at Philadelphia’s Academy of Vocal Arts.
Her signature parts are in Rossini’s La cenerentola and Il barbiere di Siviglia – her Rosina in “Barber” at the Metropolitan Opera won over audiences in New York and on cinema screens all over the world, and she was called “the best Rosina around” by the London Sunday Times for the portrayal. Honors bestowed upon Ms. DiDonato include the Metropolitan Opera’s Beverly Sills Award, the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Singer of the Year; the Richard Tucker Award, given to a single American singer annually; second place in Plácido Domingo’s Operalia, and prizes from the George London Foundation, the ARIA Award Foundation, and the Sullivan Foundation.
	STEFANO DE PEPPO Dr. Bartolo Italian born Stefano de Peppo, as a talented child, was part of the Children’s Chorus of Teatro La Scala in Milan. After studying at the Conservatory of Music in Milan and in London, he made an early debut in an English version of The Marriage of Figaro in 1989 in London. Invited to the Bellas Artes Opera House in Mexico City, he moved there in 1990 and sang leading roles of Don Giovanni, Barber of Seville, Le Nozze di Figaro, Cosi fan tutte, Gianni Schicchi, etc. with great acclaim.
In the USA he sang at Los Angeles Opera (invited after an audition with Placido Domingo), Washington Opera, Palm Beach Opera, Wichita Grand Opera, Kansas City Lyric Opera, and among others. He sang Leporello in Rome in a highly successful production of Don Giovanni filmed by Italian TV RAI. A great singing actor known for his crisp diction, he is a master in Mozart, Rossini, and Donizetti’s comic repertory.
	WILLIAM BROWNING Figaro William Browning, Kansas baritone, spent the summer of 2007 in San Francisco, where he was a member of San Francisco Opera’s prestigious Merola Opera Program. Last season with Wichita Grand Opera he appeared as Benoit and Alcindoro in La Boheme, Valentin in Faust, and the Sergeant of Police in The Pirates of Penzance. In previous seasons he performed the roles of the Marquis D’Obigny in La Traviata, Mercutio in Romeo & Juliet, Count Ceprano in Rigoletto, Yakaside in Madama Butterfly, 3rd Priest in Die Zauberflöte, and 1st Man in Pagliacci. An alum of Wichita Grand Opera’s Young Artist Program, this is his second season as a Resident Artist.
	PATRICK GREENE Count Almaviva American tenor Patrick Greene made his European debut as Rodolfo in La Bohème at the Heidelberg Opera where he also starred as Count Almaviva in The Barber of Seville. He sang Alfredo in La Traviata at Staatstheater Cottbus, the title role of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide at the Bellingham Music Festival, and Rodolfo at the Stadttheater Giessen.
In 1992 he was awarded the Koch Cultural Trust, which partially funded his studies at the Manhattan School of Music. During the 1999-2000 Season, Mr. Greene was the resident lyric tenor at the Staatstheater Braunschweig where he performed numerous roles. He made his New York debut at Carnegie Hall in Mozart’s Requiem with John Rutter conducting, and his America opera debut as Alfred in Die Fledermaus with Sarasota Opera. Last season with WGO, Mr. Greene appeared as the Judge in A Masked Ball and starred as Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance.
	SCOTT CONNER Don Basilio Scott Conner, from Olathe, Kansas, made his professional operatic debut singing the role of Colline in La Bohème opposite Marcello Giordani with the WGO in February 2008. Scott followed this success with the role of Wagner in Faust opposite Samuel Ramey, also with the WGO, and several roles at Mobile Opera, The Kansas City Lyric Opera, and Opera New Jersey, among others. A WGO Young Artist, Scott recently won the Metropolitan Opera’s District competition.
In December 2008, he will make his international debut singing the role of Colline with Lviv State Opera and Odessa National Opera in the Ukraine. Scott’s upcoming engagements include the roles of Nourabad in The Pearl Fishers and Don Basilio in The Barber of Seville with Wichita Grand Opera this season, as well as the roles of Masetto and Il Commendatore in Don Giovanni with Cleveland Opera in November of 2009. This will be Scott’s second season as a Wichita Grand Opera Young Artist.

Conductor

As the principal conductor of the Slovakian National Opera in Bratislava, Maestro Martin Mázik conducts more than 100 performances per season, including the operas La Traviata, Carmen, Don Giovanni, and L’Elisir d’Amore, as well as all three of Tchaikovsky’s ballet masterpieces: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker. In addition, he has appeared with major opera companies and orchestras in Europe, Japan and The United States. Since January 2006, he has conducted two tours through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland totaling over 60 performances. In the summer of 2006 he toured Japan with the Prague State Opera, presenting nearly 20 performances of The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro. He made his U.S. opera debut with Wichita Grand Opera’s Don Giovanni in 2004 and returned to conduct Die Fledermaus in 2005, Romeo and Juliet in 2007, and A Masked Ball, La Bohème, and Faust last season.

Director

JAMES MARVEL Stage Director (Barber) In November of 2008, James Marvel made his Lincoln Center debut for the Juilliard Opera Center with Maestro James Conlon conducting. This summer he will be directing a new production of Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria for the Wolf Trap Opera Company. In May 2008, James was named Classical Singer Magazine's "2008 - Stage Director of the Year." Since his professional directing debut in 1996, James has directed over 60 productions in the United States, England, Scotland, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. James recently made his Italian debut in Sulmona, Italy directing La Boheme. In 2009, he will make his debut in Seoul, South Korea. His new production of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress for the San Francisco Opera Merola Program was named "Best Production of the Year" by the San Francisco Chronicle. James served as Co-Director with Henryk Baranowski at Teatr Wielki in Lodz, Poland on Philip Glass' Akhnaten, which won 2 Golden Mask Awards for Best Direction and Best Production of the Year. Other career highlights include groundbreaking new productions of Les Pecheurs De Perles for Opera Boston; La Voix Humaine at Florence Gould Hall in New York City and for the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, Belgium; and Tosca at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia.

Full Cast

    WGO Orchestra and Chorus   Cast of Characters

Chorus: Notary, Magistrate, Serenaders, Soldiers  

*WGO Resident Artist                ^†WGO Young Artist

Opera Story

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Composer Bio

Gioacchino Rossini was born in Pesaro, Italy on February 29, 1792.  Both his parents were musicians, his father a horn player, his mother a singer; he learnt the horn and singing and as a boy sang in at least one opera in Bologna, where the family lived. He studied there and began his operatic career when, at 18, he wrote a one-act comedy for Venice. Further commissions followed, from Bologna, Ferrara, Venice again and Milan, where La pietra del paragone was a success at La Scala in 1812. This was one of seven operas written in 16 months, all but one of them comic.

This level of activity continued in the ensuing years. His first operas to win international acclaim come from 1813, written for different Venetian theatres: the serious Tancredi and the farcically comic L'italiana in Algeri, the one showing a fusion of lyrical expression and dramatic needs, with its crystalline melodies, arresting harmonic inflections and colourful orchestral writing, the other moving easily between the sentimental, the patriotic, the absurd and the sheer lunatic. Two operas for Milan were less successful. But in 1815 Rossini went to Naples as musical and artistic director of the Teatro San Carlo, which led to a concentration on serious opera. But he was allowed to compose for other theatres, and from this time date two of his supreme comedies, written for Rome, Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola. The former, with its elegant melodies, its exhilarating rhythms and its superb ensemble writing, has claims to be considered the greatest of all Italian comic operas, eternally fresh in its wit and its inventiveness. It dates from 1816; initially it was a failure, but it quickly became the most loved of his comic works, admired alike by Beethoven and Verdi. The next year saw La Cenerentola, a charmingly sentimental tale in which the heroine moves from a touching folksy ditty as the scullery maid to brilliant coloratura apt to a royal maiden.

Rossini's most important operas in the period that followed were for Naples. The third act of his Otello (1816), with its strong unitary structure, marks his maturity as a musical dramatist. The Neapolitan operas, even though much dependant on solo singing of a highly florid kind (to the extent that numbers could be, and have been, interchanged), show an enormous expansion of musical means, with more and longer ensembles and the chorus an active participant; the accompanied recitative is more dramatic and the orchestra is given greater prominence. Rossini also abandoned traditional overtures, probably in order to involve his audiences in the drama from the outset. In Naples the leading soprano was Isabella Colbran, mistress of the impresario, Barbaia. She transferred her allegiance to Rossini, who in 1822 married her; they were not long happy together.

Among the masterpieces from this period are Maometto II (1820) and, written for Venice at the end of his time in Naples, Semiramide (1823). Barbaia gave a Viennese season in 1822; Rossini and his wife returned to Bologna, then in 1823 left for London and Paris where he took on the directorship of the Théâtre-Italien, composing for that theatre and the Opéra. Some of his Paris works are adaptations (Le siège de Corinthe and Moïse et Pharaon); the opéra comique Le Comte Ory is part-new, Guillaume Tell wholly. This last, widely regarded as his chef d'oeuvre, and very long, is a rich tapestry of his most inspired music, with elaborate orchestration, many ensembles, spectacular ballets and processions in the French tradition, opulent orchestral writing and showing a new harmonic boldness.

And then, silence. At 37, he retired from opera composition. He left Paris in 1837 to live in Italy, but suffered prolonged and painful illness there (mainly in Bologna, where he advised at the Liceo Musicale, and in Florence). Isabella died in 1845 and the next year he married Olympe Pélissier, with whom he had lived for 15 years and who tended him through his ill-health. He composed hardly at all during this period (the Stabat mater belongs to his Paris years); but he went back to Paris in 1855, and his health and humour returned, with his urge to compose, and he wrote a quantity of pieces for piano and voices, with wit and refinement that he called Péchés de vieillesse ('Sins of Old Age') including the graceful and economical Petite messe solennelle (1863). He died, universally honoured, in 1868.