Yes, I haven’t had as much opportunity in my work conducting opera here in America and Canada to put such a program together, but I thought of integrating  not only non-operatic music but poetry as well. I chose music of Respighi, Trenti,  and Tosti. Then I thought to bring in two other European artists who traveled extensively in Italy. Franz Liszt and Hans  von Buelow, who happens to have been Liszt’s son-in-law and a very accomplished conductor. He set some poetry of Dante Alighieri.  We will include early poetry by Petrarch and Boccaccio. But also, Gabriel d’Annuccio, known as a Romanticist poet but also associated with early 20th century poetry, and considered the first modernist.​

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And let’s not forget, this music was in its time considered new and breaking with tradition. Respighi, for instance, was born at a time in the nineteenth century when Italy was all “Opera, opera, opera.”  Respighi and Pizzetti were born in the same year and they were innovators, searching for a new instrumental language of music that could speak to an Italian identity.  There is the same fervor today because contemporary composers are also searching for a new language ---a language intelligent, unique, fascinating, and moving.  Such exploration is complicated.

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I bemoaned how so much being written for opera today seems overly complicated and not so moving.

I agree.  Today we hear so much music that doesn’t find the way to the heart. It’s as if composers are expecting audiences to follow them in all their complexity rather than trusting what is simple. Composers today are afraid of being simple. I believe this program coming up in Dupont Underground, surrounded by these beautiful images of mosaics, promises to be both deeply and deliciously Italian and broadly universal.

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What the singing voice and the music does to the poetry and the conversation between the different art forms, the program promises to be alchemical mixture, certainly greater than the sum of its parts.

 At the end of our conversation, I asked Giovanni if he would speak a little about the Bel Canto in Tuscany program he runs in the summer.

We are trying to combine a study of the original performance practices with the need of young singers today, to open up possibilities of what they could explore. and to integrate through a deeper understanding the highest standards of this ‘beautiful voice’ singing.” It’s a three-week long program in the heart of Tuscany. We believe that the best way of learning this music and performing Is being around Italians themselves, to see how they talk and move. Without that filter— hearing Italian spoken on a daily basis, seeing the different manners and gestures all around – it’s hard to understand the inherent style and characters of these operas.

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Learn more about Giovanni’s summer program for singers - Bel Canto in Tuscany HERE.