the Teatro La Fenice was in the nineteenth century the site of numerous premieres of operas by Rossini (Tancredi, Sigismondo, Semiramide), Bellini (I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Beatrice di Tenda), Donizetti (Belisario, Pia de’ Tolomei, Maria de Rudenz), and Verdi (Ernani, Attila, Rigoletto, La traviata, Simon Boccanegra).
In the last century, too, great attention has been paid to contemporary productions, with world premieres such as Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, Prokofiev’s The Angel of Fire, Nono’s Intolerance, Maderna’s Hyperion, and recently Kagel’s Entführung im Konzertsaal, Guarnieri’s Medea, Moscow’s Signor Goldoni, Ambrosini’s The Word Killer.
With a capacity of 1,000 seats, excellent acoustics (further improved after the recent reconstruction following the devastating 1996 fire), a stable orchestra and chorus of 98 and 66, and a large international audience in addition to assiduous local audiences, La Fenice still stands as a major production center, with more than a hundred opera performances a year, an important symphonic season entrusted to conductors of international caliber (recall the frequent collaborations with Myung-Whun Chung, Riccardo Chailly, Jeffrey Tate, Vladimir Temirkanov, Dmitrij Kitajenko, the integral cycles of the symphonies of Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, and Mahler, and the focus on contemporary repertoire, particularly Venetian, with Nono and Maderna), ballet performances, and chamber music concerts.
