Federico Guiglia meets and interviews Cecilia Gasdia, internationally renowned soprano and today superintendent and artistic director of the Fondazione Arena di Verona.
Opera lovers and lovers of the great artistic challenges of Franco Zeffirelli, the brilliant director of theatre and cinema who recently passed away, will be able to listen to a unique and exciting testimony in Merano. On Friday 19 July at 6 p.m. at the Accademia degli studi italo-tedeschi in Via Innerhofer 1 (just behind the Church of the Santo Spirito), Federico Guiglia will meet and interview Cecilia Gasdia, the internationally renowned soprano and today superintendent and artistic director of the Fondazione Arena di Verona, who made Maestro Zeffirelli’s last dream possible: the performance of La Traviata in the Arena.
Cecilia Gasdia, who began her extraordinary career with the sudden substitution – when she was just twenty years old – of Montserrat Caballé in Anna Bolena at La Scala in Milan, will tell why Zeffirelli and La Traviata have been so important in her life. And he will explain all the novelties of the current season at the Arena, a traditional appointment with music, culture and entertainment that is also very dear to the South Tyroleans. In over thirty years of professional activity Cecilia Gasdia has performed over ninety roles in theatres all over the world, working with conductors from Riccardo Muti to Georges Prêtre, from Carlos Kleiber to Claudio Abbado, from Riccardo Chailly to Claudio Scimone with the Solisti Veneti.
In Federico Guiglia’s interview, which will be the fifth meeting in the new monthly cycle promoted by the Merano Academy on the 70th anniversary of its prestigious activity, Gasdia will recount the secrets of the stage, with anecdotes and memories of a musical life that has seen her as a protagonist of opera and pop, duetting, among others, with artists such as Andrea Bocelli.