Gaetano Donizetti: L'elisir d'amore (Pehlivanian Professional Opera Academy)

George Pehlivanian is the founder and artistic director of the Pehlivanian Professional Opera Academy (PPOA), an international educational project that brings young conductors and singers together with experienced coaches and offers them hands-on experience in the production of an opera. After moving from his native Beirut to Los Angeles, Pehlivanian studied with conductors including Pierre Boulez, Lorin Maazel and Ferdinand Leitner and went on to develop an extensive international career. As a former chief conductor and artistic director of the Slovenian Philharmonic, he remains closely connected with the musical scene in Slovenia, where every summer PPOA combines the educational process with public performance through concert stagings of operas, offering young artists practical experience of working at a professional level.

On this occasion they will perform the “comic melodrama” L’elisir d’amore, one of Gaetano Donizetti’s most popular opere buffe and a classic of Italian bel canto. The two-act opera, composed in 1832 to a libretto by Felice Romani, is a simple yet effective love story involving the naïve Nemorino, the capricious Adina and the quack doctor Dulcamara, whose playful machinations serve to showcase melodic invention and vocal virtuosity. Donizetti masterfully combines comic character with genuine lyricism, most memorably revealed in the celebrated aria “Una furtiva lagrima”. It is precisely this balance of humour, emotional directness and melodic charm that has kept the work a mainstay of the operatic repertoire worldwide for almost two centuries.