Riccardo Muti conducts second edition of his Italian Opera Academy in Tokyo

For the second time since 2019, Riccardo Muti traveled to Japan to lead his Italian Opera Academy from April 9 to 21, as part of the annual Tokyo Spring Music Festival.

Organized to coincide with spring and the blossoming of the cherry trees, the Tokyo Spring Music Festival features a wide variety of programs presented in venues throughout Ueno, the city’s cultural district. Many of the Academy activities occurred in the Bunka Kaikan, where the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed to sold-out audiences with Music Director Muti as part of their 2019 Asia Tour.

Events were well attended by audiences throughout the festival, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic that limited the turnout, many festival programs were offered as live-streamed events, with some available free to the public within Japan.

Muti’s Italian Opera Academy, which was first offered in Ravenna, Italy, in 2015 and is now presented annually in Italy, connects  young musicians, including talented young conductors, singers and  répétiteurs, with training from one of the world’s leading interpreters of Italian opera repertoire, particularly the operas of Giuseppe Verdi.

The featured selection for the 2021 Italian Opera Academy in Tokyo was Verdi’s Macbeth. Muti opened the activities with his traditional lecture, delivered at the piano, about the opera. Programs in subsequent days included sessions with four young conductors selected through an international audition process. The conductors were Johannes Löhner (Germany/USA/b. 1990) and Chiya Amos (Singapore/b. 1990), as well as Japanese maestros Tatsuma Takahashi and Hiroe Yukawa, who were personally invited by Muti to participate after others were unable to attend due to pandemic-related travel restrictions.

A highlight of the 2021 Academy program featured the four young conductors leading a concert performance of Verdi’s Macbeth with a roster of talented young Japanese singers, along with the Italian Opera Academy Chorus and Tokyo Spring Festival Orchestra on April 20 at the Muza Kawasaki Symphony Hall.

Muti took the podium for two additional concert performances at the Bunka Kaikan of Verdi’s Macbeth, leading the assembled orchestra and chorus and a distinguished group of Italian and Japanese singers, including baritone Luca Micheletti as Macbeth, bass Riccardo Zanellato as Banquo, Anastasia Bartoli as Lady Macbeth and tenor Yoshimichi Serizawa as Macduff.

Muti capped his Tokyo appearances by leading two live-streamed concerts featuring the Tokyo Spring Festival Orchestra performing Mozart’s Symphony No. 35 in D Major, K.385 (Haffner) and Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K.551 (Jupiter).

In 2016, he received the Order of the Rising Sun Award from the Japanese government. In 2018, he received the Praemium Imperiale Takamatsu Memorial World Culture Award. He remains committed to the training of young musicians with plans for future installments of the Italian Opera Academy in both Japan and Italy.