Bruno Bartoletti
Bruno Bartoletti ( born June 10, 1926 in Sesto Fiorentino, † June 9, 2013 in Florence) was an important Italian conductor, particularly 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 teacher in elementary school, whose husband was the famous sculptor Antonio Berti. She recommended the boy at the Conservatory " Luigi Cherubini " in Florence, where he was trained as a flutist and pianist. Before he got to direct, he was a pianist and accompanist at the Opera Studio of the Conservatory. Among his most important teachers was Tullio Serafin.
Bartoletti assisted in his career as a conductor several major conductors of his time as Dimitri Mitropoulos, Vittorio Gui and Tullio Serafin. With the journalist Luigi Serra, he was good friends. This reported in a later interview about him that Bartoletti did entertain the American troops in Florence during the Second World War as a pianist. Batoletti have experienced this first contact with the Americans as a very warm, with him at that time American music, especially the strongly impressed by Cole Porter.
On July 1, 1953, he married Rosanna Sandretti, an elementary school teacher who was born on July 4, 1927. In the 58 years of their marriage she was always present in the samples. When she died in 2011, she was honored by the Artistic Director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago with an obituary on the website of the opera.
Career
Bruno Bartoletti was in 1953 with Rigoletto his conducting debut at the Teatro Comunale di Firenze. After several engagements throughout Italy, he was appointed Artistic Director of the Festival Maggio Musicale Fiorentino ( 1957-64 ) and then to the chief conductor of the Opera Roma ( 1965-73 ). He was first and solid guest conductor at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen ( 1957-60 ) and at the Lyric Opera of Chicago (1956 ), where he stepped in at the age of 30 years with Verdi's Il trovatore for Tullio Serafin. The opera had only been formed two years earlier and offered Bartoletti large Enfaltungsmöglichkeiten. In 1964 he was appointed director Pino Donati under chief conductor and his deputy. 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. His career ended in 2007 with the conducting of the opera La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi.
Repertoire
Bruno Bartoletti built his career as a specialist of the operatic repertoire. He was known as an outstanding interpreter of Italian operas by Verdi and Puccini, but also as a connoisseur of music of the 19th and early 20th century. He conducted the world premieres of major opera houses, which he also directed such works of the composer Lodovico Rocca, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Alberto Ginastera and Krzysztof Penderecki. He brought several recordings of rare operas, such as La cena delle beffe most recently in 1996 by Umberto Giordano at the Opernhaus Zurich.
Under his artistic and musical direction of the repertoire of the Lyric Opera of Chicago was enriched by successful and modern works and staffed with promising young singers, so that the house among insiders as "La Scala West" made a name. From this fruitful collaboration numerous international opera stars were born.
Bartolettis wide repertoire ranging from traditional to modern music. Works that stand on the international fixtures today were brought the American stage by his commitment for the first time on the. Examples include the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle by Béla Bartók, The Makropulos Affair by Leoš Janáček, The Bartered Bride by Bedrich Smetana, Boris Godunov by Modest Mussorgsky, Lulu and Wozzeck by Alban Berg, The Fiery Angel and The Gambler by Sergei Prokofiev and Billy Budd by Benjamin Britten. In 1984 he conducted the Italian premiere of the opera The Nose by Dmitri Shostakovich after Gogol's story, which was then banned in the Soviet Union. In 1978 he conducted the world premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki 's Paradise Lost, a production that broke the budget of the house because of their cost and caused a financial crisis of the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
As Composer in Residence he won the American composer William Bolcom, who composed 1992-2004 three operas for the house and there aufführte first time: Mc Teague, based on a novel 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 by Robert Altman, who also directed the opera.
In addition, he gave young Italian conductor the opportunity to give her first debut in America at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, before they gained as Daniele Gatti and Riccardo Chailly international celebrity. He also promoted yet unknown conductors such as Leonard Slatkin, Dennis Russell Davies and George Manahan, or the 26 -year-old director Peter Sellars, who directed 1983 The Mikado.
Major opera singer worked with him. The long list includes famous names such as Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Marilyn Horne, Grace Bumbry, Catherine Malfitano, Jussi Björling, Renata Tebaldi, Mirella Freni, Montserrat Caballe, Giuseppe Di Stefano, and Richard Tucker. In addition, Bartoletti found new young singing talents as Monna Ry Andersen worldwide.
In later years he taught at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena.
Bruno Bartoletti conducted worldwide at renowned opera houses such as the Opera Roma, the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, the Scala Theatre, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, the Opera House Zurich and several years at the Festival Maggio Musicale in Florence. In recent years he has been invited to conduct the Glyndebourne Festival, the Salzburg Festival and the Festival d' Aix -en- Provence, and engaged at the Paris Opera.
He described his life once, reflecting on his career, as "very long symphonic poem. "