Renato graduated from Turin University in Physics. He has always had a particular passion for music and the stage. A former member of a choir, he was raised in the musical milieu influenced by the eminent Italian musicologist Massimo Mila. In 2014, Renato started his own blog, which now has 1000 posts.
In Robert Carsen's staging, the “dead city” is absent: the scenery showing a bourgeois room that one imagines overlooking a bright avenue in Vienna or Berlin rather than a dark alley in Bruges.
In the role created for Jenny Lind, Lisette Oropesa, in her debut in the theater, shows her magnificent silvery voice, beautiful vibrato and impeccable colorature.
Il re pastore seems to be a work that deserves to be included in the repertoire for its undoubted qualities and not only because it foreshadows the genius of the works that will follow.
Three sopranos and three tenors express a catalogue of "affections" in musical numbers full of coloraturaand virtuosic effects that are already 100% Mozart despite the young age of the composer.
Female voices dominate in the vocal cast: Rachel Willis-Sørensen debuts as Leonora and charms the audience; Anna Maria Chiuri has the temperament and rich vocality requested by the role of the gypsy.
The imaginative baroque architecture of the Buontalenti Grotto in Palazzo Pitti Boboli Gardens is an inert background to the action in this reprise of one of the first operas.
The use in the score of ancient musical instruments is what differentiates this work: pifferi, a lute, a “viola pomposa” give this work a distinctive flavour.
Director Davide Livermore sets the story at the time of the Dolce Vita, including the motorbike from the film Roman Holiday and the roadster from The Easy Life.
