The countdown begins for the great New Year’s Eve concert at the Teatro Massimo. Music by Verdi, Strauss, Lehar, Bernstein: on stage Paolo Fanale and Nadine Sierra. On the podium Giacomo Sagripanti, applauded all over the world. The concert offered by the presidency of the municipal council: the proceeds go to charity.
Two singing stars, a young conductor acclaimed throughout the world on the podium, an enthralling programme with great arias by Verdi, Strauss, Lehar, Bernstein, the orchestra and choir of the Teatro Massimo. The countdown to the great New Year’s Eve concert at the Teatro Massimo begins, scheduled for 1 January 2017 at 6.30 pm. Ticket sales have started earlier than in previous years, to meet the city’s great expectation for a concert that is always sold out.
This year the two protagonists will be Nadine Sierra, this year’s star of Lucia di Lammermoor at the Teatro Massimo, currently at the Met in Nyc, just back from a great success at the Paris Opera, and Paolo Fanale, from Palermo, also star of the last New Year’s Eve concert, this year in the Magic Flute at the Teatro Massimo, soon to be in Vienna for Falstaff with Zubin Mehta. On the podium Giacomo Sagripanti, a young but world-renowned conductor, who will conduct Traviata in the 2017 season, and already applauded in Paris, Munich, Moscow, Zurich, and Valencia. The programme includes arias from Rigoletto, Nabucco, Strauss’s Blue Danube, excerpts from Lehar’s The Merry Widow, West Side Story and Bernstein’s Candide. As every year, the concert is offered by the city council presidency.
‘We have been repeating, for four years now, this tradition of the New Year’s Eve Concert that the city enjoys so much,’ says the president of the city council, Totò Orlando, ‘an occasion for celebration but also for solidarity. We are now examining a number of ideas to choose which associations will receive the proceeds of the event’.
“It is confirmed,” says Mayor Leoluca Orlando, “what has become a splendid tradition of celebration, culture and solidarity that is realised thanks to the human, artistic and professional sensitivity of the workers, artists and management of the Massimo Theatre. I am certain that this year too it will be a great and very well attended celebration of the city’.
“A beautiful festive occasion – adds the superintendent Francesco Giambrone – and a nice opportunity to reaffirm the proximity of the Massimo Theatre to the instances that come from the territory. Our Rainbow Choir with children from the migrant communities, the Operacamion project that brings opera to the city’s suburbs, and the children’s projects are all initiatives of social value in which we deeply believe”.