11-23 April 2006. Conducted by Mark Stringer, directed by Walter Le Moli, with Cristina Gallardo-Domas, Vladimir Stoyanov, Ursula Ferri, Annely Peebo.

Il Console by Gian Carlo Menotti will be showing at the Teatro Regio di Torino (11-23 April). The first performance took place in Philadelphia on 1 March 1950; 15 days later it launched in New York and was an extraordinary success: there followed some 269 repeats and Menotti was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music and the New York Critics Award for the best musical theatre. The theme of the opera takes its cue from a factual news item: a Polish emigrant killed herself because she did not get a residents permit for the United States. It is an opera of grand dimensions with which Menotti puts himself to the test for the first time and where, in contrast to his previous works, he makes ample use of dissonance (as in the long arrangement which accompanies the death of the woman). It is an opera which delighted Jean Cocteau but which Igor Stravinskij did not like, and the critics opinions were similarly mixed: some hailed it as a masterpiece, while others accused the music of lacking a coherent language and of seeming too much like a soundtrack. At the premire at La Scala in 1951 there was much applause but also numerous objections, which resulted in a ten-minute interruption of the opera. The production at the Teatro Regio is a new version conducted by Mark Stringer and directed by Walter Le Moli, with Raffaella Angeletti, Vladimir Stoyanov, Ursula Ferri, Annely Peebo and Panajotis Iconomou. Paolo di Nicola