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