Pier Luigi Pizzi
Pier Luigi Pizzi (born June 15, 1930 in Milan , Italy ) is an Italian set designer , costume designer and opera director .
Life
Pier Luigi Pizzi completed an architecture degree at the Politecnico in Milan . In 1951, against the will of his skeptical father, he began working at the theater, first around Giorgio Strehler and then at the Teatro Tommaseo in Genoa , which soon brought him together with Giorgio De Lullo and his company Compagnia dei Giovani . Later he worked for years as a stage and costume designer, mainly with the director Luca Ronconi , where he was active in both acting and opera. In 1977 Pizzi made his debut as a director with Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Turin , which was followed by numerous other opera productions, for which he also designed sets and costumes. Today, Pizzi works exclusively on the opera stage in the personal union of director, set and costume designer.
Pizzi has worked at important theaters such as La Scala in Milan , the Burgtheater in Vienna , the Vienna State Opera , the Paris Opera , the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London , the Bavarian State Opera in Munich , the Arena di Verona and the opera houses in Florence , Naples and Palermo , Parma , Reggio nell'Emilia or the Teatro La Fenice in Venice . Pizzi created numerous productions for the Rossini Opera Festival Pesaro , with which he has worked for decades.
As a set designer, Pizzi tends towards designs that precisely define the performance space and include many built elements. The influence of his architecture studies is unmistakable. As a rule, it is about rooms that do not hide their artificiality and are often equipped with stairs, platforms etc. and are mostly subject to constant transformation. He hardly ever strives to achieve a spatial illusion or theatrical realism, and if so, then to counteract the respective performance traditions. That is why Pizzi in Richard Wagner's Die Walküre (directed by Ronconi, Milanese Scala, conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch ) showed apparently lifelike interiors of the nineteenth century that were surrounded by rampant nature and did not hide their artificial theatricality. He repeatedly cites works of the fine arts in his works, for example in Giuseppe Verdi's La forza del destino at the Vienna State Opera (directed by Luigi Squarzina , conductor Riccardo Muti ), where he recreated parts of Francisco de Goya's Los desastres de la Guerra and in the frame of a traditional, multiple ruffled opera curtain of the 19th century. For Ronconi's staging of Die Bakchen at the Vienna Burgtheater, Pizzi again referred to antiquity by making its rediscovery in the Italian Renaissance visible and bringing parts of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza onto the stage, broken up by a wooden stage portal that was shown from behind .
As an opera director, Pizzi is characterized by a non-ideological approach to the works of the composers. He can come very close to the intentions of the authors and reproduce their visions filtered through his glasses, on the other hand he can also tend to ironic distortions or radical simplifications. Pizzi tends to be cautious when it comes to directing the person; he tends to incorporate the singers into the stage designers and characterize them with simple, mostly color-accentuated costumes made with contemporary materials, which only show their historicity as a quotation.
In 1990 Pizzi opened the newly built Opéra Bastille in Paris with his production of Les Troyens by Hector Berlioz . In December 2004, Pizzi designed the set and costumes for L'Europa riconosciuta by Antonio Salieri for the reopening of the renovated La Scala in Milan, where he worked again with Luca Ronconi for the first time after a break of around twenty years and, as an exception, was only responsible for the furnishings.
In October 2005 Pizzi was appointed artistic director of the Macerata Opera Festival , where he has already worked as a director several times. He will hold this position until 2007.
Pizzi has also appeared as an exhibition designer. In 2004 the Museo teatrale alla Scala in Milan opened with the new facility designed by Pizzi.
Awards
In 2016 he was awarded the Premio Bacco dei Borbone ( Festival della Valle d'Itria ).
Pizzi is a knight of the French Legion of Honor .
Work
(Selection; unless otherwise stated, Pizzi is responsible for direction, set design and costumes)
- Maria Stuarda ( Gaetano Donizetti , director De Lullo, conductor Francesco Molinari-Pradelli , Maggio Musicale Florence 1967)
- Carmen ( Georges Bizet , directed by Ronconi, Arena di Verona 1970)
- The Bacchae ( Euripides , directed by Ronconi, Wiener Burgtheater 1973)
- Die Walküre (Wagner, directed by Ronconi, conductor Sawallisch, Milan Scala 1974)
- Aida (Verdi, directed by De Lullo, conductor Claudio Abbado , Scala 1974)
- La forza del destino (Verdi, directed by Squarzina, conductor Riccardo Muti , Vienna State Opera 1974)
- Così fan tutte (Mozart, directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi , conductor Karl Böhm , Scala 1975)
- Don Giovanni (Mozart, Turin 1977)
- Les martyrs (Donizetti, directed by Alberto Fassini , conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti , Venice 1978)
- Parisina ( Pietro Mascagni , conductor Gianandrea Gavazzeni , Rome 1978)
- Orlando furioso ( Antonio Vivaldi , conductor Claudio Scimone , Verona, 1978)
- Semiramide ( Gioachino Rossini , conductor Jesús López Cobos , Aix-en-Provence, 1980, conductor Alberto Zedda , Teatro Margherita Genua and Teatro Regio Turin, 1981)
- Ariodante ( Georg Friedrich Händel , conductor Alan Curtis , Piccola Scala in Milan, 1981)
- Faust ( Charles Gounod , Bavarian State Opera Munich 1980)
- Tancredi (Rossini, conductor Gelmetti, Pesaro 1982)
- L'assedio di Corinto (Rossini, conductor Eliahu Inbal , Teatro Comunale Florence, 1982)
- Mosè in Egitto (Rossini, conductor Claudio Scimone , Pesaro 1983, 1985, Rome 1988)
- Les Indes galantes ( Jean-Philippe Rameau , conductor Philippe Herreweghe , Paris / Dijon / Venice, 1983)
- Hippolyte et Aricie (Rameau, conductor John Eliot Gardiner , Aix-en-Provence 1983, conductor William Christie , Paris 1985)
- L'Orfeo ( Claudio Monteverdi , Palazzo Pitti Florence 1984)
- Alceste ( Christoph Willibald Gluck , Geneva 1984, Paris 1985)
- I Capuleti ei Montecchi ( Vincenzo Bellini , conductor Muti, Covent Garden London 1984)
- Rinaldo (Handel, conductor Charles Frederick Farncombe , Reggio Emilia 1985 and Paris conductor Charles Mackerras )
- Nel Giorno di Santa Cecilia ( Festa teatrale by Pizzi with music by Henry Purcell , conductor Charles Frederick Farncombe, Reggio Emilia, 1986)
- Bianca e Falliero (Rossini, conductor Donato Renzetti , Pesaro 1986)
- " Mosè in Egitto " (Rossini, conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch , National Theater Munich, 1988)
- Otello, ossia Il moro di Venezia (Rossini, conductor John Pritchard , Pesaro 1988, Chicago 1992)
- Don Carlo (Verdi, conductor Claudio Abbado , Vienna State Opera 1989)
- Les Troyens (Berlioz, conductor Myung Whun-Chung , Paris 1990)
- Les Danaïdes (Salieri, conductor Claudio Scimone , Ravenna 1990)
- Castor et Pollux (Rameau, conductor Christie, Aix-en-Provence 1991)
- La nascita di Orfeo ( Lorenzo Ferrero , conductor Giuliano Carella, Teatro Filarmonico Verona, 1996)
- Aida (Verdi, Arena di Verona 1999)
- L'Europa riconosciuta (Salieri, directed by Ronconi, conductor Muti, Milan Scala 2004)
- La Gioconda ( Amilcare Ponchielli , Arena di Verona 2005)
- A Midsummer Night's Dream ( Benjamin Britten , conductor Ion Marin , Teatro Real Madrid 2006)
literature
- Maria Ida Biggi (Ed.): Pier Luigi Pizzi alla Fenice . Marsilio 2005. 248 pages, 334 illustrations (color, black / white). ( ISBN 88-317-8807-8 )
Web links
- Biography of Pier Luigi Pizzi (Italian)
- Biography Pizzis on the homepage of the Arena di Verona (Italian)
- Artistic Director Macerata with detailed biography (Italian)
- Comments by Pizzis at a panel discussion in 2001
- Scene from Pizzi's production of I due Foscari at La Scala in Milan (1979; here in the revival in 1988)
- Scene from Pizzi's production of I vespri siciliani , La Scala, Milan 1989
- Scene from Pizzi's production of La traviata , Teatro Real, Madrid 2003
- Review with photos of Pizzi's La traviata production, Teatro Real, Madrid 2003
personal data | |
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SURNAME | Pizzi, Pier Luigi |
BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian set designer, costume designer and opera director |
DATE OF BIRTH | June 15, 1930 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Milan , Italy |