Summer opera – Don Carlos Giuseppe Verdi

Music & culture

Jul 8

Who: Opera Bergen

What: Don Carlos Giuseppe Verdi's opera from 1867

Where: Bergen

Project period: 2024

Web: Opera Bergen

About the organization:

OPERA BERGEN was founded in 1982 by Anne Randine Øverby and Tone Kvam Thorsen. During the years, the aim has been all the same; to produce opera performances at an international level, either alone or in cooperation with cultural institutions on a regional, national and international level. OPERA BERGEN has, since its founding, produced more than 160 operas, where quite a number has been first performances ever in Norway or Scandinavia. The work list of OPERA BERGEN includes fully staged productions of standard works by Verdi, Puccini, Rossini and Mozart, together with operas by Bizet, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Offenbach and Wagner. OPERA BERGEN has also staged several more modern operas. OPERA BERGEN presents their production partly on traditional venues like the Grieg Hall and The National Theatre in Bergen but has also showed their ability to choose different and special venues for their performances. The choice of venue is always related either to the work that is to be staged, or it is chosen as a supplement and perspective to the work. OPERA BERGEN established and developed the medieval castle in Bergen as an open-air stage for acoustic summer opera and has contributed to bringing the art to a broad audience, locals and tourists in Bergen. In the more recent years this tradition has been carried on to new in- and outdoors venues in and around Bergen city.

About the project:

Summer opera – Don Carlos Giuseppe Verdi's opera from 1867 is a magnificent and powerful portrayal of passion and political intrigue, with strong and deep characters. Verdi sets with remarkable precision tension-filled dilemmas between religious and political power, love and duty, friendship and official obligations. This grand opera takes place in the former dairy Bergensmeieriet, and the former production premises will be transformed into a palace of power, where longing for freedom and love have restricted conditions. It is an intense and breathtaking story of love, the loneliness of power, sacrifice and political shrewdness. Great international opera singers will portray the royal protagonists; Iano Tamar as Elisabeth of Valois, Joseph Gipali as Don Carlos, Giacomo Prestia as Philip II and Maria Berezovska as Princess Eboli. They all made a big success in Opera Bergen´s production of Il Trovatore in 2023. Director is ROCC, and conductor is Anne Randine Øverby. Previous summer operas clearly show that dramatic and solemn opera plots such as Macbeth, Aida and Nabucco attract a large audience to the same extent as more "light-hearted" titles and genres. In 2023, Opera Bergen had great success with Carmen in the Bergensmeieriet, and the old dairy has a construction, acoustics and area that is very well suited for further development of both hall and stage in an unconventional arena. The locations have also proven to be suitable for catering and exhibitions in connection with the performances, and enabled a total experience of opera, art and catering in an exciting development area in our city.