This year’s Macerata Opera Festival will feature three open-air operas and concerts in July and August in the great open-air arena of the Sferisterio. A novelty will be the symphonic concerts with leading performers like Mehta, Chung and Lisiecki conducting the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia orchestras.
Twenty-two evenings of open-air music
The 2022 programme is the first under the new artistic direction of Paolo Pinamonti, who comes to the Sferisterio with an important curriculum, having been artistic director of the Teatro La Fenice in Venice and the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples among others. The new artistic team has combined opera with a series of high-level symphonic concerts, and is also giving space to the cinema and its relationship with music. In total, from 19 July to 21 August, there will be twenty-two evenings at the Sferisterio and two at the Lauro Rossi Theatre.
Mixing opera and the silver screen
"The world of cinema - underlines Pinamonti - will unite the Macerata Opera Festival 2022 playbill on several levels.” In fact the new production of Tosca (22, 24, 29 and 31 July) by director Valentina Carrasco will be set in a 1950s film set. Carmen Giannattasio, Antonio Poli and Claudio Sgura will sing the leading roles, with Donato Renzetti on the podium.
I Pagliacci and The Barber of Seville
The 2015 production of Leoncavallo's Pagliacci by Alessandro Talevi will be presented again on 5, 7 and 11 August, preceded by the screening of one of Charlie Chaplin's masterpieces, The Circus which will be accompanied by a live performance of the original soundtrack restored by Timothy Brock who will also conduct Pagliacci, with Rebeka Lokar, Fabio Sartori and George Petean in the leading roles. The third opera will be Il Barbiere di Siviglia (12, 14, 19 and 21 August), which returns to the Sferisterio after an absence of almost twenty years, in a new staging that sets the opera on a television, rather than a film, set. The cast includes Alessandro Luongo, Serena Malfi, Ruzil Gatin, Andrea Concetti and Roberto De Candia, with young emerging talent Alessandro Bonato conducting. 
Great orchestras, famous conductors and Toquinho
The lineup of great orchestras and famous conductors will open the festival on 19 July with the orchestra and chorus of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and Zubin Mehta in Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. This will be followed on 21 July by the orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia conducted by Myung-Whun Chung performing Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 Pastorale and Symphony No. 7. And then Beethoven’s five piano concertos performed by the Canadian Jan Lisiecki, a young piano star, who will also conduct the orchestra on 4 and 6 August. The Sferisterio Arena will also be the setting for an evening dedicated to Brazilian music with the great singer and guitarist Toquinho performing on 13 August.
