Bruno Bartoletti

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Bruno Bartoletti (born June 10, 1926 in Sesto Fiorentino , † June 9, 2013 in Florence ) was an important Italian conductor who promoted the Italian and contemporary repertoire through his work at the Lyric Opera of Chicago .

Life

As a child, Bruno Bartoletti played the piccolo in a local chamber orchestra , in which his father Umberto, a blacksmith, played the clarinet . Bruno's musical talent was discovered by a music school teacher in elementary school whose husband was the well-known sculptor Antonio Berti . She recommended the boy to the “Luigi Cherubini” Conservatory in Florence, where he was trained as a flautist and pianist . Before he learned to conduct, he was a pianist and répétiteur in the Opera Studio of the Conservatory. Among his most important teachers was Tullio Serafin .

In his conducting career, Bartoletti assisted several important conductors of his time such as Dimitri Mitropoulos , Vittorio Gui and Tullio Serafin. He was good friends with the journalist Luigi Serra. In a later interview he reported that Bartoletti had entertained the American troops in Florence as a pianist during the Second World War . Batoletti felt this first contact with the Americans to be very warm, although he was greatly impressed by American music, especially that of Cole Porter .

On July 1, 1953, he married Rosanna Sandretti, an elementary school teacher who was born on July 4, 1927. During the 58 years of their marriage, she was always present at the rehearsals. When she died in 2011, she was given an obituary on the opera's homepage by the artistic director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago .

Career

Bruno Bartoletti made his debut as a conductor at the Teatro Comunale di Firenze in 1953 with Rigoletto . After several engagements throughout Italy, he was appointed Artistic Director of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Festival (1957–64) and then Chief Conductor of the Roma Opera (1965–73). He was first and permanent guest conductor at the Royal Theater in Copenhagen (1957–60) and at the Lyric Opera of Chicago (1956), where at the age of 30 he stood in for Tullio Serafin with Verdi's Il trovatore . The opera had only been founded two years earlier and offered Bartoletti great opportunities to develop. From 1964 he was appointed chief conductor and his deputy under Artistic Director Pino Donati . He led the orchestra in more than 55 different operas in almost 600 performances. From 1975 to 1999 he was also artistic director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago. He ended his career in 2007 conducting the opera La traviata by Giuseppe Verdi.

repertoire

Bruno Bartoletti built his career as a specialist in the opera repertoire. He was known as an excellent interpreter of Italian operas by Verdi and Puccini , but also as an expert on the music of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He has conducted world premieres at major opera houses , which he also staged such as works by composers Lodovico Rocca , Gian Francesco Malipiero , Alberto Ginastera and Krzysztof Penderecki . He made several recordings of rare opera works, most recently in 1996 La cena delle beffe by Umberto Giordano at the Zurich Opera House .

Under his artistic and musical direction, the repertoire of the Lyric Opera of Chicago was enriched with successful and modern works and filled with promising young singers, so that the house made a name for itself among insiders as “La Scala West”. Numerous international opera stars emerged from this fruitful collaboration.

Bartoletti's broad repertoire ranged from traditional to modern music. Works that are on the international repertoire today were brought to the American stage for the first time through his commitment. Examples are the operas of Bluebeard's Castle by Béla Bartók , The Makropulos Case by Leoš Janáček , The Bartered Bride by Bedřich Smetana , Boris Godunow by Modest Mussorgski , Lulu and Wozzeck by Alban Berg , The Fiery Angel and The Player by Sergei Prokofjew, and Billy Budd by Benjamin Britten . In 1984 he conducted the Italian premiere of the opera Die Nase by Dmitri Shostakovich based on Gogol's story , which was banned in the Soviet Union at the time . In 1978 he conducted the world premiere of The Lost Paradise by Krzysztof Penderecki, a production which, because of its cost, exceeded the budget of the house and caused a financial crisis for the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

As composer in residence , he brought the American composer William Bolcom , who composed three operas for the house from 1992 to 2004 and performed them for the first time there: Mc Teague , based on a novella by Frank Norris , A view from the bridge , an adaptation of the play of the same name by Arthur Miller and A Wedding , based on a film directed by Robert Altman , who also directed the opera.

In addition, he gave young Italian conductors the opportunity to make their first American debut at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, before reaching international fame like Daniele Gatti and Riccardo Chailly . He also promoted as yet unknown conductors such as Leonard Slatkin , Dennis Russell Davies and George Manahan or the 26-year-old director Peter Sellars , who staged The Mikado in 1983 .

Eminent opera singers worked with him. The long list includes famous names like Plácido Domingo , Luciano Pavarotti , Marilyn Horne , Grace Bumbry , Catherine Malfitano , Jussi Björling , Renata Tebaldi , Mirella Freni , Montserrat Caballé , Giuseppe Di Stefano or Richard Tucker . In addition, Bartoletti found young, new singing talents like Monna Ry Andersen around the world.

In later years he taught at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena .

Bruno Bartoletti has conducted worldwide at renowned opera houses such as the Opera Roma, the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden , London , the Scala , the Grand Théâtre de Genève , the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires , the Zurich Opera House and for several years at the Maggio Musicale Festival in Florence . In recent years he has been invited as a conductor to the Glyndebourne Festival , the Salzburg Festival and the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence and has been engaged at the Paris Opera .

He once described his life, reflecting on his career, as a "very long symphonic poem."

Awards

literature

  • Alain Pâris: Dictionnaire des interprètes et de l'interprétation musicale au XXe siècle. Editions Robert Laffont, Paris 1989,
    ISBN 2-221-06660-X

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ E 'morto Bruno Bartoletti. on Cado in piedi. Retrieved July 14, 2013
  2. ^ Triste: Chicago's former italian maestro has died. on artsJournalblogs.com. Retrieved July 14, 2013
  3. ^ Bruno Bartoletti, Maestro Who Shaped Lyric Opera of Chicago, Dies at 86. on The New York Times. Retrieved July 14, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Bartoletti, Bruno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian conductor
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Sesto Fiorentino
DATE OF DEATH June 9, 2013
Place of death Florence