Antonino Fogliani

Movie - 2022, 2h 15m • as Self - Conductor

Puccini’s last opera is all about riddles. The Emperor of China rules over the Forbidden City of Peking. His unmarried daughter, the Princess Turandot, has refused her hand to all her princely suitors by putting them to a test. She sets them three riddles; if they do not answer them correctly, they will lose their heads. As unlucky suitors fail and fall, up steps Calaf, a prince of the Tatar people. Daniel Kramer’s new staging in Geneva transposes the old fairy tale to a futuristic world where Turandot’s magic holds sway. In a dystopian game show, reminiscent of Hunger Games, the Princess presides over a surveillance state in which men are culled and the reproduction of the human race is conducted in breeding labs.

Movie - 2012, 2h 15m • as Conductor

Set in Memphis and Thebes during the time of the pharaohs, the story centres on a love affair between Aida, an Ethiopian slave owned by Amneris, the pharaoh’s daughter, and Radamès, a captain in the Egyptian guard. Their relationship is thwarted by the armed conflict between their two peoples and the jealousy of Amneris, who is in love with Radamès. ‘Aida’ is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi, with a libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni based on a plot by Auguste Mariette, premiered on 24 December 1871 at the Khedivial Opera House in Cairo. From the box set ‘Tutto Verdi’, featuring 27 of Verdi’s operas. Recorded live at the Teatro Regio in Parma on 1 and 5 February 2012.

Movie - 2022, 2h 15m • as Conductor

A feathered thief, a servant wrongly sentenced to death and a corrupt, power-hungry politician: those are the protagonists of Rossini’s semi-serious opera whose overture, with its drum rolls and oboe solo, is one of the best-known pieces in the history of music. La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie) is set in a time of great social upheaval. When Ninetta is accused of stealing a silver spoon, a series of unfortunate events begins that initially makes the happy ending expected from an opera semiseria seem highly unlikely. What sort of world is it where a person can be executed for the alleged theft of a spoon? Tobias Kratzer, successful as a director throughout Europe, now debuts in Vienna with Rossini’s opera that received its first performance in 1817 and traces the uncertainty felt by people in a politically and socially destabilised world.