Muti’s Italian Opera Academy Returns to Tokyo with Verdi’s “A Masked Ball”

Through an ongoing partnership with the Tokyo Spring Festival, Riccardo Muti traveled to Japan’s cultural capital in March to lead the third edition of his Italian Opera Academy, focused on Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball). From March 18 through April 1, Muti offered programs about the opera from the piano and worked with young conductors and collaborative pianists to prepare for the public performances of the opera that featured the young conductors and concluded the Academy. Muti, the CSO’s Zell Music Director, conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and renowned soloists in Verdi’s A Masked Ball in June 2022, which The New York Times hailed as a “sumptuous performance…with this superb orchestra.”

Previously, Muti led a Tokyo edition of the Academy in the spring of 2021, concentrating on Verdi’s Macbeth, including special accommodations for online audiences while Covid-19 health precautions were still in place for public performances. Muti’s first edition of the Italian Opera Academy at the Tokyo Spring Festival took place in 2019 and delved into Verdi’s Rigoletto.

Muti, who is widely recognized as one the leading interpreters of Italian opera and Verdi’s music, established the Italian Opera Academy in his home city of Ravenna, Italy in 2015. Through the activities of the Academy, he aims to provide the next generation of musicians with a connection to the traditions of Italian opera that he learned from his own distinguished teachers including Antonino Votto, who was the assistant conductor of the famed Arturo Toscanini.

Muti is involved in the selection of talented, early career conductors from around the world at each edition of the Academy. For this Tokyo edition, he worked with Andreas Ottensamer (Austria), Kyotaro Sawamura (Japan), Magdalena Klein (Germany) and Leonard Weiss (Australia). The Academy culminated with an April 1 performance featured each of the young conductors leading a portion of Verdi’s A Masked Ball.

The Tokyo-HARUSAI Festival Orchestra was the featured ensemble for the week’s activities, with the Tokyo Opera Chorus, joining the musicians for public performances. The cast included tenor Motoki Ishii as Riccardo, soprano Tamayo Yoshida as Amelia, baritone Takashi Aoyama as Renato, mezzo-soprano Takashi Aoyama as Ulrica, soprano Yumiko Nakahata as Oscar, bass-baritone Koji Yamashita as Samuel and bass-baritone Shigeru Hatakeyama as Tom, as well as baritone Shigeru Hatakeyama as Silvano, tenor Yuji Shida as the judge and tenor Toru Tsukada as a servant of Amelia.

Before the performances with the Academy’s participants, Maestro Muti conducted two sold-out performances at the Bunka Kaikan on March 28 and 30. The cast for these productions featured three performers heard in the CSO’s 2022 performance — soprano Joyce El-Khourry as Amelia, mezzo-soprano Yulia Matochkina as Ulrica and soprano Damiana Mizzi as Oscar — as well as tenor Azer Zada as Riccardo, baritone Serban Vasile as Renato, and baritone Takaoki Onishi as Silvano.

Since 2005, the Tokyo Spring Festival — one of Japan’s largest classical music festivals — has welcomed the arrival of spring and the blooming of the city’s famous cherry blossoms with an exceptional and wide-ranging program that offers concertgoers options to hear some of the world’s most distinguished artists in opera, orchestra and chamber music programs in Ueno, the city’s cultural district. Many of the Festival performances such as the Italian Opera Academy activities take place in the Bunka Kaikan, where Muti and the CSO performed Verdi’s Messa da Requiem in multiple sold-out concerts during the 2019 Asia tour.