Name: La bohème, first love
Start: 2027-05-02T16:00:00
Location: Piccolo Regio Giacomo Puccini

Emanuele Quaranta

Adrian Autard

Dohoon Lee

Ilaria Monteverdi

Albina Tonkikh

Eduardo Martínez

Guido Dazzini

Giulia Rossena

Alice Benazzi

Teatro Regio Torino

A dazzling one-act opera, a journey into the psyche of a betrayed woman, consumed by rage and abandonment—feelings that awaken ancient, blood-soaked codes of honour. If Giovanni Verga’s eponymous novella has, over time, shaped the imagination of all Sicilian dramas of jealousy, this is also due to the music of Pietro Mascagni: direct, immediate, rough, with a special luminosity in evoking the landscape of the small town of Vizzini and a sudden violence in the eruption of passions. The emotional impact on the listener has endured since, to quote Sciascia, “the cry ‘they have killed compadre Turiddu’ for the first time sent a shiver down the spine of opera lovers.”

Cavalleria rusticana

Teatro Regio di Torino

Ruggero Leoncavallo claimed that the story of Pagliacci was true: a murder he himself, as a child, allegedly witnessed being committed by a killer dressed as a clown. At the beginning of the opera, a character—the Prologue—feels compelled to warn us that everything we are about to see is not fiction, as in a traditional disclaimer, but a genuine “slice of life.” But is it really so? Where does the boundary between reality and representation lie? And is that fragile boundary enough to save a life in danger?

Pagliacci

Puccini was not the only composer to write an opera based on the Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henri Murger: Ruggero Leoncavallo also, in those same years, devoted an opera to the adventures, pranks, loves, and sorrows of the young bohemians of Paris. Time has favored Puccini’s version, which has remained firmly in the repertoire, while Leoncavallo’s version, premiered a year later in 1897, has been forgotten. Right here at the Regio, the birthplace of Puccini’s masterpiece, La bohème by Leoncavallo is presented again to the public in a rare staging, offering the chance to observe Marcello, Rodolfo, Colline, Schaunard, and a city teeming with life from a different perspective—one more faithful to Murger’s text and perhaps also more realistic, yet with music that does not forgo melodic effusion, a taste for pastiche, and the rapid succession of moments of playful lightness and dramatic intensity: all elements in which the composer of Pagliacci has few rivals. The female characters also include Eufemia, who joins the contrasting figures of Mimì and Musetta, portrayed respectively by Francesca Dotto and Anna Goryachova. Rodolfo and Marcello have vocal roles reversed compared to Puccini’s version: here the tenor is Marcello, performed by Matteo Lippi, while Rodolfo is the baritone Alessandro Luongo. With this production, Francesco Micheli offers a further interpretation of Leoncavallo’s theatrical universe and the bohemian story. From the podium, Andrea Battistoni continues his exploration of Italian musical verismo.

La bohème

No use beating around the bush: Mascagni’s operas following Cavalleria rusticana all different from one another have been overshadowed by the fame of the first. A fate in many ways unjust given their musical quality. Iris is one of these hidden gems: first performed in 1898 it is the first example of an Italian opera set in Japan and anticipates some ideas that would soon appear in Madama Butterfly (moreover with the same librettist Luigi Illica). But unlike Puccini’s Mascagni’s Japan is idealized and completely detached from reality as befits a symbolist drama: in an idyllic place among flowers bamboo and streams two agents of evil lie in wait. The victim is a young girl whom Illica and Mascagni follow with masterful skill through the tortuous paths of her mind where dreams and memories of childhood collide with the horror of the world the abduction for the purpose of sexual abuse and finally the agony on the mysterious boundary between life and death. Their creation explores an intimate side of femininity in this case transfigured in a symbolic key.

Iris

Under the baton of Music Director Andrea Battistoni, the Orchestra del Teatro Regio plunges into a whirlwind of mystery and sensuality. The enveloping, exotic scents of Saint-Saëns’ Bacchanale give way to the tragic intensity of Berlioz, whose La Mort de Cléopâtre paints the supreme and fatal ecstasy of the Queen of Egypt — brought to life by the suave voice and breathtaking vocal virtuosity of mezzo-soprano Antoinette Dennefeld. The concert then transforms into a celebration of sweeping rhythms, featuring music from two ballets radiating Iberian passion: the three dances from Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, with their proud Andalusian spirit, and Ravel’s hypnotic and overwhelming Boléro.

Rapture

It opens with the highly anticipated return of the celebrated dance gala featuring Roberto Bolle alongside numerous international performers.

Roberto Bolle and Friends

The first tour of the Tokyo Ballet, founded by the legendary Tadatsugu Sasaki, took place sixty years ago in Moscow and Leningrad, and passed the most rigorous test in the country of the masterpieces of Petipa’s great repertoire. The tours have now reached thirty-six, with performances throughout Europe, at La Scala as well as at the Paris Opéra, the original cradles of ballet, but also in Buenos Aires and Beijing. In Tokyo, Vladimir Vasiliev of the Bolshoi staged Don Quixote and Natalia Makarova, a sublime figure of the Mariinsky, La Bayadère. However, choreography by twentieth-century authors is also well represented in the Japanese company’s portfolio, with Kylián, Neumeier, Ek, Forsythe, and Teshigawara. The Tokyo Ballet’s repertoire also includes twenty-two works by Maurice Béjart, the demiurge of neoclassical-modern ballet who, from Brussels, shaped the postwar era worldwide. For the company, the Marseilles-born master created The Kabuki (1986), drawing on that glorious traditional Japanese total theater genre—with its stories of courageous samurai and geishas—which some young people today, bored in nightclubs, find themselves embodying, captivated by katanas, percussion, and kimonos. He later conceived M (1993) for the Tokyo Ballet, based on the life of Yukio Mishima, and personally entrusted them with Le Sacre du Printemps and Boléro, which have made history with audiences around the world.

The Tokyo Ballet

The Nutcracker has now become a true family ballet: Christmas, which brings everyone together around festive tables, always draws crowds of new young spectators who discover it alongside adults delighted to accompany them on a journey through gifts, dances, nightmares, and the final triumph of love, set to Tchaikovsky’s enchanting music.

The Nutcracker

Davide “Boosta” Dileo is far more than just a co-founder of Subsonica: he is an internationally acclaimed keyboardist and electronic music composer who creates a unique sonic universe in each of his pieces. For the Filarmonica TRT, he has created Horae, a meditation on the passage of time brought to life through a dialogue between orchestra, piano, and synthesizer. Ensuring a perfect balance between digital beats and classical phrasing is Maestro Valentino Corvino, a versatile conductor with a unique sensitivity for blending classical, pop, and electronic music.

Fusions

Edgar is many firsts. It marks the first time Puccini tackled a libretto of broad scope, following the smaller-scale debut of Le Villi. It is also the first time he set to music a subject in a medieval setting, with a chivalric and military tone that would remain unique in his output. And it is the first time he assigned a woman the role of an antagonistic virago, with the formidable (already from her name) Tigrana: a soprano of similar ferocity would only appear again with Turandot, at the end of his artistic journey.

Edgar

It may seem paradoxical, but one of the titles in which Vivaldi’s theatrical talent can be best appreciated is not intended for the stage. Juditha triumphans is in fact an oratorio (the only one by its composer that has survived), intended for a concert performance. More precisely, a “sacred military oratorio,” since it was written in 1716 to celebrate the victory of the Republic of Venice in defence of Corfu, a Venetian possession, besieged by the Turks. The biblical episode of Judith beheading Holofernes thus provides the pretext for an allegorical representation: Venice–Judith, Corfu–Bethulia, and Turks–Assyrians. An allegory which, in Vivaldi’s hands, becomes material from which recitatives, arias, and choruses in an operatic style emerge with ever-renewed freshness. The sumptuousness of the vocal lines—written entirely for female voices, partly en travesti—is unsurprising, given that the singers of the first performance were the orphans of the :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}, which provided women with an exceptional musical education, and where Vivaldi had recently been appointed “maestro de’ concerti.” Nor is the orchestral splendour surprising, since, in addition to the singers, the composer also had at his disposal equally virtuosic female instrumentalists. What is more striking, rather, is his ability to vividly depict actions and emotions that seem visible even without sets or costumes, his imaginative instrumental combinations, and the way the music fits the already highly musical Latin verses of Giacomo Cassetti, giving them full theatrical meaning. In the city that preserves almost all of Vivaldi’s manuscripts, the welcome return of Gianluca Capuano, a specialist in Baroque repertoire, takes place after his acclaimed performance last season at the :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1} in Die Entführung aus dem Serail.

Juditha triumphans

An authentic legend of our time, Grigory Sokolov embodies the purest essence of pianism: his is an art that rejects compromise and lives solely in the unrepeatable moment of the concert. An inspiration that, for the first time, is part of the Teatro Regio’s season, for an evening that sees him as the absolute protagonist. Appreciated equally by connoisseurs and enthusiasts alike for the almost mystical intensity of his performances and for his boundless knowledge of the piano repertoire, the artist has a very intimate relationship with music: “I do not play on demand,” he declared in an interview, “I only play what I wish to play, or rather, only what I wish to play at that very moment. Every piece must arouse in me a burning desire.”

Absolute

His friends recount that when Puccini finished writing La bohème, he gathered them around the piano to let them hear it. Deeply moved, they exclaimed: this opera is about us, it is us! More than a century has passed, and even today we can say the same: this story speaks of the dreams we whisper to ourselves in the mirror, of the desires and regrets that keep us awake at night, of all the great and small losses we have endured, of the winters and summers of a lifetime. Can we love knowing that one day what we love will no longer be there? How can one go on living when death takes away what is most dear to you? And what remains of those we have loved, of all that immense love?