Pietro Di Bianco to make US Debut in Minnesota

Pietro Di Bianco as Thoas in Iphigenie en Tauride at the Opéra national de Paris (left)

Italian barihunk will make his long-overdue US debut on January 26th at the Minnesota Opera in Nino Rota’s The Italian Straw Hat. The 2014 Paris Opera Awards Competition winner has sung to great acclaim at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, Opéra national de Paris, Wexford Festival Opera and the Innsbrucker Festwochen.

In this absurdist farce by the composer of the music for The Godfather films, groom-to-be Fadinard gallops around Paris on his wedding day in search of a straw hat to replace the one his horse has inadvertently eaten. The bright and breezy score captures the increasingly ridiculous situation that rides on the edge of chaos. Di Pietro will sing the role of the jealous husband Beaupertuis, who suspects that his wife Anaida is having an affair.

The Straw Hat from Milan's La scala with Juan Diego Florez:

The opera premièred at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo on April 21, 1955 and had its first US performance at the Santa Fe Opera in 1977.

Di Pietro wraps up today as Vincenzo Biscroma in Donizetti's Viva la Mamma! in Geneva. This season he will also appear as Pistola in Verdi's Falstaff at The Grange Festival and in Cesti's La Dori in Innsbruck.

Iurii Samoilov makes US debut in Detroit

Iurii Samoilov (Photo by Maria Shkoda)

Iurii Samoilov made his long overdue American debut on October 13th singing the title role in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin at Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit. The cast also includes Corinne Winters as Tatyana, Jamez McCorkle as Lensky and Carolyn Sproule as Olga.

There will be additional performances on October 17, 19 and 21 and tickets are available online.

Samoilov first sang the role of Onegin at age 19 in his native Ukraine. 

He will return to his home base at the Oper Franfurt to sing Riccardo in Bellini's I Puritani on December 2.  According to his website, he is also slated to make his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in the near future.

Andrè Schuen making US debut with Schubert concerts

Andrè Schuen

Tyrolian barihunk Andrè Schuen is making what we believe is his American debut with two concerts of Schubert lieder. He joins composer/pianist Thomas Adès for Tanglewood's “Schubert’s Summer Journey,” a six-concert exploration of the music of the composer. The program includes his famous setting of Goethe’s Wanderers Nachtlied II.

Tickets and additional information is available online.

On July 29th, he'll sings Schubert's Schwanengesang at the Aspen Music Festival with pianist Andreas Haefliger. Schuen and Haefliger will perform the songs not in one grouping but as distinct sets, separated by two solo piano works, Beethoven's Piano Sonata op. 101 and Berg's Piano Sonata.  Tickets are available online.

Andrè Schuen sings Hugo Wolf's Goethe Lieder:

In October, he returns to the opera stage at the Opéra national de Lorraine to portray the title role in Mozart's Don Giovanni. The cast includes Nahuel di Pierro as Leporello, Levente Páll as Masetto, David Leigh as the Commendatore, Kiandra Howarth as Donna Anna, Yolanda Auyanet as Donna Elvira and Julien Behr as Don Ottavio. Additional information is available online.

Malte Roesner to perform lost Soler and Süßmayr songs

Dashe Cellars in Oakland and German bass Malte Roesner

Malte Roesner, who is making his U.S. stage debut with West Edge Opera in Vicente Martín y Soler's The Chastity Tree (see our post), will also be making his U.S. concert debut at Dashe Cellars on July 22 performing lost Soler songs along with his wife soprano Aurora Perry, hunkentenor Sam Levine and accompanist Bob Mollicone on fortepiano.

The concert tickets also include wine from Oakland's Dashe Cellars, a premiere California winery that uses traditional and natural winemaking techniques, including small-lot fermentation, the use of indigenous yeasts, and little-to-no fining or filtration. Their wines frequently score 90+ points in leading wine magazines. Click HERE to purchase tickets.

The concert will feature music by Soler and his Viennese contemporaries Mozart, Antonio Salieri, Franz Xaver Süßmayr and the blind, female composer Maria Theresia von Paradis. The concert will explore the musical landscape of 18th century Vienna, where all of the composers on the program either knew each other or inspired each other. Another common thread will be texts by the famed librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte.

Malte Roesner

Roesner is performing two sets of music that have not been heard since the 18th century: Soler's "Songs and Duets for the Princess of Wales," which he found in an archive in London, and a set of songs by Süßmayr that he unearthed from the Austrian National Library. Perry will be singing Soler's "Songs for Miss Miller" and selections from Mozart, while Levine will sing Paradis' "Songs for the Duchess of Saxony" and songs by Salieri.

Despite being born in New York City, Roesner was raised in Germany and has focused his career in Europe. During his decade as a fest singer at the Staatstheater Braunschweig he portrayed more than fifty roles in the baritone repertory. He took some time off to retrain as a basso cantante and auditioned in the United States last year, eventually landing one of the few principle roles for a bass, Doristo in The Chastity Tree at West Edge Opera. Tickets are on sale HERE.

Roesner, who also trained as a musicologist, was hugely responsible for unearthing many of the lost manuscripts for this program.

Duncan Rock making two major debuts

Duncan Rock

Fans of Duncan Rock in the U.K. will get their last chance to see him perform this year, when he joins soprano Anna Devin, tenor Joshua Mills and mezzo Kathryn Rudge for Mozart's Requiem tonight at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

He then heads off to Madrid to take on two roles in Willy Decker's production of Britten's Death in Venice at the Teatro Real. This will be his debut with the company. An additional highlight of this show will be Anthony Roth Costanzo singing the voice of Apollo. Performances run from December 4-23 and tickets are available online. 

Duncan Rock as Don Giovanni

Fans in the U.S. are eagerly anticipating his American stage debut when he's featured at the Boston Lyric Opera in the title role of Mozart's Don Giovanni next season. Performances will run from May 1-10, 2015 and tickets are now on sale at the BLO website. The remainder of BLO's upcoming season includes Verdi’s La Traviata, Frank Martin’s The Love Potion and Janáček’s Kátya Kabanová.

A little bit of trivia about Duncan Rock, that readers may not know, is that he started his musical career playing the bagpipes.

If want to enjoy an entire year of nineteen of opera's sexiest men, order you 2015 Barihunks Charity Calendar today by clicking on the LULU button below.