Speranza Scappucci is conducting La Rondine, Giacomo Puccini’s “Viennese” Opera, at the Metropolitan Opera until April 20.
Scappucci will talk about this little jewel of the Tuscan composer with musicologist Harvey Sachs at the Italian Institute of Culture (686 Park Avenue) on April 8, 6pm.
It will also be the occasion to get to know better one of the most celebrated Italian women conductors. Scappucci is best known to the Italian public for a TV show on RAI, the Italian State television, about music and opera where she served as resident expert at the piano. But she is celebrated among music lovers also because in 2022 she was the first Italian woman to conduct at Teatro alla Scala in Milan. With subsequent house debuts at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, at the State Opera in Berlin and at the Opéra national de Paris, she consolidated her position as one of the most interesting conductors of her generation on the international scene. Starting with the 2025/2026 season, she will be Principal Guest Conductor at the Royal Opera House in London.
Last year she already conducted Verdi’s Macbeth at the Met. This year she will also make her house debut at the Chicago Lyric Opera with Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment and she will return to the Washington National Opera with Puccini´s Turandot.
Harvey Sachs, writer and music historian, published his twelfth book in 2023: Schoenberg: Why He Matters, issued by Liveright (New York and London).There are now more than seventy-five editions in seventeen languages of Sachs’s eleven other books. The most recent of the previous ones, Ten Masterpieces of Music, was published in October 2021 by Liveright. Its predecessor, Toscanini, Musician of Conscience – which replaced his 1978 biography of the famed Italian conductor – was published, also by Liveright, in 2017, to great critical success.
