Roberto Hazon (conductor)

Roberto Hazon (born September 25, 1854 in Borgo Val di Taro , † September 9, 1920 in Milan ) was an Italian conductor and music teacher.

Hazon studied at the Scuola del Carmine in Parma and at the Conservatory of Milan. In Milan he was a student of Franco Faccio , who was a conductor at La Scala . He then worked as opera conductor at the Teatro Dal Verme until he traveled to Melbourne in 1886 with the New Royal Italian Opera Company under the direction of Martin Simonsen . He performed with the Company in Melbourne, Sydney and other Australian cities and in 1888 decided to stay in Australia.

George Rignold engaged him in concerts at Her Majesty's Theater in Sydney in 1889 , and in the same year he became conductor of the Sydney Philharmonic Society . With this and the singer Charles Santley he successfully performed Mendelssohn's Elias , other popular oratorios, works by Australian composers such as Charles Packer and Alfred Hill and - for the first time in Sydney - Hector Berlioz ' La damnation de Faust . In addition, he taught singing, harmony and orchestration.

In 1891 Hazon founded the Sydney Amateur Orchestral Society . At their annual concert series he performed many new works and brought musicians such as Johann Kruse (1895) and Ignacy Paderewski (1904) to Australia. In 1901 he traveled to Italy to hire musicians and singers for James Cassius Williamson's Italian Opera Company , of which he was conductor and artistic director that season. With this he performed Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème , Giuseppe Verdi's Otello and Umberto Giordano's Fedora for the first time in Australia .

In 1907 Hazon gave his farewell concert at Sydney Town Hall . He returned to Milan and conducted there for some time at La Scala. In 1910 he traveled to Australia again as conductor of Williamson's Grand Opera Company , where he performed Puccini's Madama Butterfly in English with Bel Sorel and Amy Castles .

source

• Australian Dictionary of Biography - Roberto Hazon