Damiano Michieletto will be the one to “invent” the Caracalla Festival 2025 programme, on the occasion of the 2025 Jubilee. This is a new challenge and an unprecedented form of artistic collaboration for Damiano Michieletto and the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma. An idea and a project conceived in the last few months, in which director has been working with the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma for the filming of two of his latest productions: Rigoletto, programmed at Caracalla last August, and Julius Caesar in Egypt, at the Teatro Costanzi on the occasion of its Italian premiere.
“Working with an artist such as Damiano Michieletto,” says Sovrintendente Francesco Giambrone, “is always a source of great inspiration. Lately we have been lucky enough to stage two of his productions, one of them was held at Caracalla. It was precisely from our day-to-day work and the time we spent together that the idea of a collaboration based on a different kind of creativity was born. His vivid imagination and his formidable intuition seemed to us to be the ideal characteristics for the idea of a programme of events to be staged in an impressive and unique space such as the Terme of Caracalla. After all,” Giambrone continues, “this year our summer festival has turned into a real festival, with opera, dance, cinema, theatre, symphonic music, jazz and pop. All that was missing was a great artist to seal the programme with his signature. We found him and gave him carte blanche, starting with the idea we had been working on together for years, for a production of Bernstein’s West Side Story, planned precisely for the summer 2025”.
“I am very pleased to get to work with the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma,” said Michieletto, “in order to produce an exciting programme to offer the audiences of Caracalla. I thank the Sovrintendente Giambrone who has given me this great opportunity. Important tasks must always be tackled with determination and spirit of humbleness, and it is with this spirit that I want to work together with the many people at the theatre that I have got to know first-hand over the years and that I have come to appreciate for their expertise. It will be a fantastic experience !”.
Damiano Michieletto has staged eight works for the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, including performances at the Teatro Costanzi, at Caracalla and at the Circo Massimo. Three of them were new productions specially produced for the Fondazione Teatro dell’Opera. He debuted in April 2016 with Puccini’s Trittico. This was followed by Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims (June 2017), Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust, this was a new production that inaugurated the 2017/2018 season and won the Abbiati Prize as best performance of the year, which was followed by Lehár’s The Merry Widow (April 2019). In July 2020 he staged his new production of Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Circo Massimo after several months of theatre shutdown which was caused by the pandemic. Then there was Verdi’s Luisa Miller, conducted by Michele Mariotti in February 2022, followed by Bernstein’s Mass at the Terme of Caracalla (which was a new production) in the summer of the same year, and the revival of Rigoletto, this time at Caracalla, which was performed last August. Just today, 13 October 2023, his production of Händel’s Julius Caesar in Egypt will be staged at the Teatro Costanzi in its Italian premiere.
Rome, 13 October 2023
