Michela Gerosa

The batons will be those of Antonino Fogliani, Chiara Cattani and Alberto Zanardi, while the directors who will sign the stagings will be Katharina Thoma, Benedetto Sicca and Silvia Paoli The festival will run from Nov. 13 to 29, Gaetano Donizetti's birthday Carnets for Donizetti Opera 2026 will be available for purchase during the current festival at the Donizetti Theatre Box Office or bookable online On the eve of the debut of Donizetti Opera 2025, people are already looking ahead, and everything is also ready for the 2026 edition of the international festival dedicated to Bergamo composer Gaetano Donizetti: L'esule di Roma, Alahor in Granata e Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali are the three titles on the bill of the upcoming Donizetti Opera, organized by the Donizetti Theater Foundation of Bergamo, chaired by Giorgio Berta with the general direction of Massimo Boffelli, and supported by the City of Bergamo. "Today we are presenting an edition in which Donizetti rarities are absolute protagonists," says artistic and musical director Riccardo Frizza . Donizetti Opera 2026, in fact, will go to enhance the rediscovery of lesser-visited titles by Donizetti, starting with the performance of the autograph score of Alahor in Granata, found in 2023 at the Palermo Conservatory library. In addition, for the next edition of the festival I have decided to entrust the podium to colleagues who are specialists in the repertoire, focusing my role fully on artistic and musical direction, taking particular care of the realization of new projects that will see the light of day in the coming years." Opening the festival at Bergamo's Donizetti Theater will be the melodrama L'esule di Roma, a title composed in 1828 for the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, staged Nov. 13, 21 and 29. The performance will be entrusted to the baton of Antonino Fogliani, a conductor with an international profile who will be on the podium at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich in the coming days to perform La fille du régiment, and to German director Katharina Thoma, who has signed productions at the Glyndebourne Festival, the Royal Opera House in London, the theaters in Frankfurt, Cologne, Leipzig and Malmö and is head of the department of stage art at the Hochschule für Musik in Würzburg. Both are making their Donizetti Opera debuts. Absolute opportunity for rediscovery is the staging of the title of the "Donizetti 200" project, which includes at the Teatro Sociale in Bergamo (Nov. 14, 22 and 27) a work composed exactly two hundred years earlier by the composer from Bergamo: it is Alahor in Granata, an opera proposed in the new edition edited by Edoardo Cavalli, compiled following the identification of the autograph score at the library of the Conservatorio "A. Scarlatti" in Palermo in 2023. "Gaetano Donizetti spent a long period of work in Palermo, at the Teatro Carolino, from April 1825 to February 1826," says Paolo Fabbri, scientific director of the Centro Studi Donizettiani: "This stay was studied in his time by Palermo musicologist

Concerts in theaters, museums and venues of the City intertwined with cinema and meetings with schools Coinciding with the sale of new subscriptions to the three evenings at the Donizetti Theater and tickets for the two dates at the Teatro Sociale, the Donizetti Theater Foundation presents the full program of the 2025 edition of Bergamo Jazz, a festival organized with the support of the City of Bergamo, MIC-Ministry of Culture, and private sponsors and that for four days, March 20-23, will spread the thousand sounds of jazz throughout the City. Sounds of Joy is the title chosen by Joe Lovano, Artistic Director of Bergamo Jazz since last year, to testify to the great variety and vitality of sounds, rhythms and colors that mark a music that represents one of the cornerstones of contemporary artistic expressiveness. "Sounds of Joy means the celebration of a musical community born among people for people. It is the celebration of jazz from its origins until today: the dance of life, love and spirit unites us as one," Joe Lovano specifies, "The idea of jazz improvisation has taken many paths over the years and resulted in a beautiful art form with many directions and influences. This idea has inspired the most innovative and influential musicians in the music world on a global scale.The multigenerational and multicultural sounds that animate the joy of hearing music will come to us through the passion and expressiveness of all the artists we have invited for the 46th edition of the Bergamo jazz festival." Keeping faith with its own nature, Bergamo Jazz 2025 will also be a Festival with an international scope, a widespread Festival: in addition to the concerts at the Donizetti and in the theater in Città Alta, already announced in recent months, significant events hosted in small theaters, in museums, and in venues transformed for the occasion into cozy jazz clubs are in fact planned. Nourished will be the representation of Italian musicians, including numerous new talents, and considerable will be the space for jazz conjugated to women, with the presence of established singers and instrumentalists. The next edition of Bergamo Jazz therefore promises to be very rich both in content and in the number of its protagonists: more than 80. And a relevant space will also have interweaving with other arts, especially cinema, and popular meetings aimed at the youngest.   Jazz at Donizetti On Friday, March 21, the first of three subscription evenings at the Donizetti Theater, beginning at 8:30 p.m., beloved by Bergamo audiences and those from all over Italy and beyond, will be opened by the duo formed by double bass ace Dave Holland and Lionel Loueke, one of the most innovative guitarists to appear on the jazz scene in recent decades. A thick artistic pair that will serve as "openers" to the Wayne Shorter Legacy, namely pianist Danilo Pérez, double bassist John Patitucci, drummer Brian Blade and, in the role of special guests, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, musicians who certainly do not need much

The Prose and Other Paths Season of the Donizetti Theater Foundation continues under the sign of one of the great names of Italian theater, Eduardo De Filippo: in fact, from Saturday, March 8 to Sunday, March 16, the following is staged on the city's main stage The Art of Comedy, with adaptation and direction by Fausto Russo Alesi. The Palermitan actor and director himself, who has already been appreciated several times in Bergamo, will play the role of the capocomico Oreste Campese, the text's main protagonist. Other performers and characters: David Meden (Veronesi, piantone), Sem Bonventre (Palmira, hostess of the tavern), Alex Cendron (His Excellency De Caro, prefect), Paolo Zuccari (Giacomo Franci, his secretary), Filippo Luna (Quinto Bassetti), Gennaro De Sia (Padre Salvati), Imma Villa (Lucia Petrella), Demian Troiano Hackman (Gerolamo Pica), Davide Falbo (Un uomo). The Art of Comedy, an extraordinary and brilliant work by Eduardo De Filippo, is part of "Odd Days," the collection that-from different angles-addresses the difficult issues of everyday life. Incredible is the strength and topicality of the text that brings us in a direct way to confront the mortification and censorship of culture. Written in 1964 - ambiguous and at the same time farcical - it is a little-visited work, seemingly less explosive than the most famous masterpieces; instead, it is a masterful, wide-ranging and extraordinarily imperfect text, as imperfect is the human being in search of his identity, his right to exist, in short, in search of answers to those pressing and necessary questions that cannot wait any longer. The questions, doubts, responsibilities, constraints and weaknesses that Eduardo brings to the table affect us all, and that "Theater," whether it is a theater company, a community or a small world, becomes a resonator of our relationship with power and the need to be heard and, above all, recognized. "Come to the theater Mr. Prefect! - says the head playwright Oreste Campese - In Theater the supreme truth has been and always will be the supreme fiction...": it all starts here. How much can the distance and filter of theater, through fiction, help us deal with reality? Winner of three Ubu Awards as best leading and supporting actor, nominated for a David di Donatello for best supporting actor in Marco Bellocchio's Esterno Notte, Fausto Russo Alesi has been one of the most appreciated actors in film and theater since the early 2000s. In cinema, besides Bellocchio, he has worked with Silvio Soldini, Florestano Vancini, Mario Monicelli, Carlo Mazzacurati, Sergio Castellitto, Marco Tullio Giordana, and Roberto Andò. In theater he has collaborated with Luca Ronconi, Serena Sinigaglia, Peter Stein, Damiano Michieletto, Gabriele Vacis and others. Fausto Russo Alesi starred in 2017 at Teatro Sociale in Ivan, a play loosely based on Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, co-produced by Fondazione Teatro Donizetti and directed by Serena Sinigaglia.

From Baroque music to jazz, from Bach to Charlie Parker via Mozart and Donizetti: a kaleidoscope of sounds, rhythms and colors characterizes the fourth edition of Il Centro della Musica, six concerts scheduled on Saturday afternoons between May 31 and July 7, now a traditional event organized by the Donizetti Theater Foundation in collaboration with the Bergamo City Council's Social Policies Department. A valuable opportunity to enter the city's main theater and its Ridotto named after a great conductor, on an unusual day and time. An original way to experience the city center by combining the magic of music with being together in the theater. "In its fourth edition, The Music Center confirms itself as a review that aims to offer moments of musical sharing with varied content, on a weekday and at a time that allows both the Donizetti Theater and the adjacent Piacentiniano Center to come alive," specifies Massimo Boffelli, General Director of the Donizetti Theater Foundation, "The usual collaboration of the Bergamo City Council's Social Policies Department testifies to an institutional synergy that aims to make the most of an initiative with an inclusive character, intended for audiences of all ages." "This year the partnerships with the Orchestra Filarmonica Italiana and Ensemble Locatelli, already present in previous editions ofIl Centro della Musica and in other festivals promoted by our Foundation, are also further consolidated, while we welcome the return of CDpM Europe - Centro Didattico Produzione Musica and the new entry Musica Aperta. Collaboration with all these realities is fundamental for the realization and success of the review," Massimo Boffelli concludes. The fourth edition of The Center for Music begins May 31 with theItalian Philharmonic Orchestra Ensemble and a journey into the ever-impressive world of Argentine tango. Soloists: Andrea Coruzzi, bandoneon and accordion; Cesare Carretta, violin; Nicola Ziliani, double bass. Music by Carlos Gardel, Astor Piazzolla and Richard Galliano, among others. This will be followed on June 7 by a concert by theLocatelli Ensemble conducted by Thomas Chigioni titled Bach from Organ to Bow., entirely dedicated to the Master of Leipzig: one of the most ambitious programs offered by Ensemble Locatelli over the years, the concept of which is to transfer some of Bach's greatest pages of organ music to the other great medium of expression available to the composer, the string orchestra. The following week, Saturday, June 14, theItalian Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Jacopo Rivani, will present The Diary of Adam and Eve, a concert-show based on Mark Twain's brilliant text and adapted by Silvia Rossetti. The Diary of Adam and Eve brings to the stage the brilliant and contrasting voices of the two biblical characters, played by Marco Montanari and Rendy Anoh, respectively. Original music by Danilo Comitini. On June 21, it will then be the turn of the Gruppo Fiati Musica Aperta to offer. Così fan tutte (or maybe not?), a semi-serious journey through the loves of melodrama (Mozart, Cherubini, Donizetti) with the participation of well-known comedian Enrico Beruschi. Direction by Pieralberto Cattaneo.

Returning for the third year are the Lessons in History conceived by Editori Laterza and produced in co-production with the Donizetti Theater Foundation of Bergamo and with the support of BCC Oglio e Serio: the new edition, scheduled at the Donizetti Theater, always on Saturday mornings, between Jan. 10 and Feb. 14, 2026, is entitled Cultural Capitals., with five meetings dedicated to as many cities that over the centuries have made their mark on history, contributing to the birth and development of important cultural movements, whose influence later proved fundamental. It begins on Jan. 10 with Laura Pepe, already the star of the first edition of History Lessons, and with The Athens of Pericles, the cradle of democracy and political management of public affairs. A week later, on Jan. 17, Alexander March Magnus will speak about. Venice and the dawn of books: for it is on the lagoon that everything changes and that the book publisher begins to have that valuable role of cultural mediator preserved to this day. For the third event, scheduled for January 24, Alessandra Bucossi will address the theme. Constantinople, the new Rome, where the first city stands for the emblem of cosmopolitanism, unparalleled witness of those cultural transfers between East and West at the origin of the Byzantine world. Rome, city of the gods will instead be the focus of the Feb. 7 meeting with Maurizio Bettini: a still "pagan" Rome, creator of unprecedented religious suggestions mediated by the customs of the Italic peoples and the Greek tradition. Finally, on Feb. 14, the spotlight will be on. St. Petersburg and the avant-garde, with Paolo Nori who will go back with memory and words to the St. Petersburg of the October Revolution: a hotbed of novelty, an unrepeatable ferment that, in the mingling of the new socialist ideology and the artistic avant-gardes, will radiate throughout Europe. Sergio Gandi, Bergamo City Councilor for Culture, extends the Administration's greetings to "a valuable initiative such as Lezioni di Storia, which brings to our city, for the third consecutive year, the collaboration and expertise of Laterza, one of the most authoritative publishers in the country, specialized in educational publishing. The review represents an added value in the programming of the Donizetti Theater Foundation: not only music and theater, but also education and popularization, themes that already distinguish many of its activities, especially those dedicated to young people. And especially dedicated to them are these in-depth historical encounters, which transform the stage of the Donizetti Theater into an ever-growing space of culture, also open on Saturday mornings. Citizens and townspeople can satisfy their desire for in-depth study, listening to authoritative voices of our present, to discover and explore figures and stories of our past." Giorgio Berta, president of the Donizetti Theater Foundation, confirms how "this initiative is a significant expansion of our range of activities, flanking the many proposals in the spectacular sphere, from prose to opera to jazz. The History Lessons fully correspond to that diversification of offerings that

DONIZETTI OFF.: THE PALINSESTO OF DONIZETTI OPERA TO EMBRACE BERGAMO WITH DOZENS OF SIDE EVENTS A festival within a festival with concerts, open rehearsals, conversations, book presentations, guided tours, participatory performances and activities for children, exhibitions and breakfasts between the Donizetti Theater and Casa Natale: the Donizetti Opera offers a busy schedule of more than 30 initiatives from World Opera Day on October 25 through November 30, 2025   Exhibitions, concerts, conversations, open rehearsals, figure theater, walks on the Walls, and even breakfast with Gaetano at Casa Natale or brunch at the Theater: Donizetti Opera 2025 is not limited to major productions on stage, but involves the city of Bergamo with "Donizetti Off," a busy schedule of events, many of them free, which after the recently concluded CineDOperameetings and the opening at the Donizetti Studio of the widespread exhibition Caterina Cornaro Experience. A Queen to Remember , continues from Oct. 25, World Opera Day, until Nov. 30 to tell the story of Donizetti in every form. Between music, art and speech, audiences of all ages are involved, from the youngest children with their families to the largest business professionals: a festival that becomes, in this way, a collective experience, capable of bringing opera into dialogue with the city, tradition and history with actuality and contemporaneity, thanks to the will of the Fondazione Teatro Donizetti. In this regard, Sergio Gandi, Deputy Mayor and Councillor for Culture of the Municipality of Bergamo, states, "With the Donizetti Off, the Donizetti Opera festival takes an important step this year, gathering and expanding in an organic review the collateral events that animate Bergamo. It is confirmation of a mature cultural project, capable of networking the city's major cultural institutions, as well as artists and citizens around the name of Donizetti and the value of shared culture." Giorgio Berta, President of the Donizetti Theater Foundation, continues, "The schedule of side events was created to give recognition and continuity to a set of initiatives that knows how to bring alive the relationship between the festival and the city. This new review represents a natural evolution of the mission of the Donizetti Theatre Foundation: to spread musical and theatrical culture in all its forms. And the achievement of that goal is also made possible thanks to the invaluable support of the many supporters of our theater to whom we renew our gratitude." Massimo Boffelli, General Director of the Fondazione Teatro Donizetti, specifies, "Gathering the festival's collateral events into a single review means enhancing the choral work of so many parties that contribute to the growth of Donizetti Opera. But it is also a sign of a theater that opens its doors wide to the city, in a continuous osmosis between the halls and the squares. The Donizetti Off is the result of a concrete collaboration between institutions, partners and city realities, a sign of a community that invests with conviction in culture, involving several generations in a single project." And he specifies M° Riccardo Frizza, Artistic and Musical

Donizetti Theater Foundation The 2024-2025 Theater Season Tuesday, October 14 marks the beginning of new subscription sales for the 2025/2026 Theater Season and from October 21 new subscriptions for Altri Percorsi and Operettas are available Great success for the Theater Season renewal campaign: over 92% compared to last Season The countdown has begun for the 2025-2026 Theater Season and Altri Percorsi of the Donizetti Theater Foundation. Tuesday, October 14 marks the start of new subscription sales for the Theater Season, while from Tuesday, October 21, subscriptions for Altri Percorsi series and the Operetta Season will be available. From Tuesday, November 28, individual show tickets will be available for purchase for all seasons. From October 14, tickets are also available for other events included in the Theater Season: the December 31 musical The Dream Factory, concerts at the Teatro Sociale, Rigoletto: The Mystery of the Theater for Opera Family. All programs can be viewed on the Foundation's website www.teatrodonizetti.it. Online sales at www.vivaticket.com. "Over 92% of Theater Season subscribers have renewed their trust in us, and the high demand from educational institutions has already led us to add an extra performance of Lysistrata with Lella Costa and two more of The Late Mattia Pascal with Giorgio Marchesi, one of the Altri Percorsi titles. The start of new subscription sales, and soon individual tickets, couldn't begin under better circumstances," comments Massimo Boffelli, General Director of the Donizetti Theater Foundation. Specifically, here's a summary of the two Seasons.   Drama Season The beginning, from December 6 to 14, 2025, is entrusted to a show that refers to our country's theatrical tradition, specifically to the Ligurian one embodied by Gilberto Govi and his Pignasecca e Pignaverde , one of the celebrated Genoese comedian's warhorses, revived by an overwhelming Tullio Solenghi, with scenic design by Davide Livermore. Following, from January 17 to 25, 2026, the Donizetti, with Crisis of Nerves , will host for the first time a direction by Peter Stein, who returned to his beloved Chekhov with the three famous one-act plays The Bear, On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco and The Proposal, interpreted in rotation by various actors, among whom Maddalena Crippa stands out. Another great actress starring in a classic will be Lella Costa, who will perform in Lysistrata directed by Serena Sinigaglia: the show will come to Bergamo from February 7 to 15, with Monday the 9th's performance added due to high demand from schools. The Theater Season program will feature other prestigious actors and directors. Among the latter, Sergio Rubini directs The Jekyll Case , choosing to stage the literary classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, in a reinterpretation that transports the text into an engaging, cinematic setting. On stage from February 21 to March 1, Daniele Russo and other actors. With the Venetian company Stivalaccio Teatro, always dedicated to the study and representation of commedia dell'arte, we will return, from March 7 to 15, to traditional theater, with Harlequin Mute