A metaphysical space, whose colors recall the gold of the sands and precious metals of Egypt and the enigmatic faces of the pharaohs’ masks: this is how Chiara Muti’s direction imagines the new staging of the Julius Caesaran operatic masterpiece by Georg Friedrich Händel, with which the 2025 Opera Season of the Alighieri Theater in Ravenna opens on Friday 17 January at 8.30 pm and Sunday 19 at 3.30 pm.
After the Tamerlane of 2023 and the Autumn Trilogy 2024, the happy collaboration with Byzantine Academy and Ottavio Dantone to bring to the stage at the Alighieri Theater the melodramatic repertoire of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, unfortunately much less frequented in Italy than that of the following centuries. Ravenna, where the new production debuts, is at the head of a group that includes Modena, Piacenza, Reggio Emilia, Lucca and the Haydn Foundation of Bolzano and Trento.
The role of Julius Caesar was entrusted to the countertenor Raffaele Pefounder of the collective La Lira di Orfeo, international star, already protagonist in the production of Handel’s masterpiece signed by Damiano Michieletto (in Paris and Rome) and winner of the Abbiati Prize of Italian Music Critics with the album Julius Caesar. A Baroque Hero (Gloss).
Cleopatra is Marie Lys. Delphine Galou plays the role of Pompey’s wife, Cornelia, while Ptolemy, Cleopatra’s brother and rival for the throne of Egypt, is Filippo Mineccia. The cast is completed by Davide Giangregorio as Achilla, Federico Fiorio as Sesto, Andrea Gavagnin as Nireno and Clemente Antonio Daliotti as Curio. Alessandro Camera signs the scenes, while Tommaso Lagattolla takes care of the costumes and Vincent Longuemare the lights.
“Julius Caesar is an opera that everyone should know, because it represents the perfect symbiosis between history and myth and the maximum harmony between music and theatre,” he declares Ottavio Dantonewho will lead the Byzantine Academy on the harpsichord. “Händel’s masterpiece”, continues the maestro, “fascinates for its particular variety of timbres and colours: harp, theorbo, viola da gamba, oboes, flute and horn embellish the orchestra, accompanying the multiple characters of the characters. The musical content, rich in suggestions and with extraordinary evocative power, transports us and places us directly inside the story as if we were experiencing it personally.”
The baroque Caesar is “a symbol of marble justice and temperance,” he points out Chiara Muti“There is nothing ambivalent about it and it dehumanizes itself to glorify, in the apotheosis of Rome, the virtues of the enlightened monarch,” namely George I and the new ruling Hanoverian dynasty, to which the composer intended to pay homage with the opera presented at the King’s Theater in London in 1724. “Thanks to the intensity of the vocal lines and the orchestral chromatic dynamism”, adds the director, “Händel redeems the static nature of the action and enriches the characters with meaning. By delving into human matter and revealing the complexity of contrasts, he offers us moments of such emotional tension that we can say that he reached, with music, the heights that Shakespeare reached with words. The direction, supported by the melody, therefore bends to the symbolic-evocative dimension”.
The 2025 Opera Season of the Alighieri Theater will continue with The vestal by Gaspare Spontini (28 February, 2 March), in which the director Gianluca Falaschi drew a parallel between the protagonist of the opera and Maria Callas; at the direction of La Corelli is Alessandro Benigni. The opera itinerary ends with Tosca (28, 30 March), directed by Luca Orsini and with Henry Kennedy on the podium of the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra.
The 2025 Opera and Dance Season is made possible by the support of the Municipality of Ravenna, the Emilia-Romagna Region and the Ministry of Culture and by the contribution of the Monte di Bologna and Ravenna Foundation.
