Born in Hokkaido, Japan, in 1968 and raised in Funabashi, Hirofumi Yoshida graduated from the Tokyo College of Music, specializing in orchestral conducting, piano, double bass and musicology.

Currently, Maestro Yoshida is the associate professor of Toho College of Music, Japan.

Jessica Pratt is one of the leading interpreters of today’s most formidable belcantista repertoire. Sought-after by the most prestigious theaters, she has performed as a protagonist in the important contexts of La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London and the Metropolitan in New York.

Born in England, raised in Australia and now living in Italy where she refines her roles under the guidance of Lella Cuberli, Jessica Pratt, began her career by singing in traditional Italian theaters and gradually making herself known to international audiences.

VINCENZO BELLINI

From I Puritani “Qui la voce sua soave… Vien diletto è in ciel la luna”
From I Capuleti e i Montichi “Eccomi in lieta vesta… O quante volte”

GAETANO DONIZETTI

From Lucia di Lammermoor “Il dolce suono… Ardon gli incensi… spargi d’amaro pianto”

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Symphony n. 7 in A major op. 92

Scenes from Lucia di Lammermoor and Linda di Chamounix

Lucia di Lammermoor

Year of composition: 1835

First performance: Teatro San Carlo, Naples, 26 September 1835

The protagonist of Donizetti’s work, taken from Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, withdraws from the real world, to which outwardly she reacts with a mask of sweetness, submission, to escape into a fairy tale world. The virtuosic vocality of the female character, often reduced to an automaton, becomes a symbol of her incapacity for positive reaction and her insecurity. In Donizetti’s opera the scene of madness, the culmination of the story, is prepared by a jaunty choir that softens the pain in a collective prayer. The delirium of the protagonist has a “creative” impression: Lucia reminiscing about the past, finally overwhelmed by the wave of memories. In music, they are the reasons for reminiscence that refer to specific episodes of the drama; their overlapping causes continuous infringements of conventional forms, in the musical form of an interior monologue. Donizetti runs the melody in the orchestra and uses the voice in “parlante”: the musical form is compromised, as if Lucia no longer recognizes the conventions of the melodramatic language, confusing recitative and cantabile.

Linda di Chamounix

Year of composition: 1841/1842

First performance: Theatre am Kärntnertor of Vienna, May 19, 1842

The opera by Donizetti, with a libretto by Gaetano Rossi, places at the center of events the most uncontrollable passions that take possession of the human soul, entirely dominating it. Love becomes a dangerous emotion, so much so that it leads to insanity. Linda is infact afflicted with madness when she is told that Carlo, her love, has succumed to the marriage arranged by his mother to a wealthy woman. Linda’s madness is unlike any other madness known in the history of opera and has little in common with Lucia’s delirium: in Linda’s case madness is a symptom, an elimination process that reveals the secret mechanism of the opera which represents the only means of release for the woman’s pain.

Scenes from I Puritani

Year of composition: 1834/1835

First performance: Théâtre de la comédie italienne, Paris, January 24, 1835

The musical narrative of I Puritani knows how to capture and preserve the theatrical espertise of the vaudeville, capture the skillful cues of the ariette transforming them into incipits of the opera narrative, but from those derived forms Bellini recreates Walter Scott’s romantic imagery and thus producing a broader communication with the audience. One of the highlights of the opera is, for Bellini himself, the scene of Elvira’s spell of madness: the fractures between cantabile and recitatives, the transition from elegy to the glimmer of festivity and finally the escape from anguish through the fictitious joy they bring the initial melancholic song to an emotional tension that is comparatively very rare in the history of musical theatre.

Symphony n. 7 in A major op. 92

Year of composition: 1811/1812

First performance: Vienna,  December 8, 1813

Movements:

1. Poco sostenuto; Vivace
2. Allegretto
3. Presto
4. Allegro con brio

The Seventh Symphony was described by Wagner as the “apotheosis of dance” because “it is dance in its highest aspect, the loftiest deed of bodily motion, so to speak, ideally in sounds”.

The novelty of this symphony is to be found in the rhythmic force that it possesses from the first to the last bar, in the art of processing the simple harmonic opening materials, to develop an unstoppable reaction.