As usual, the 21st appointment of the Tokyo Kudan Minami concert series, at the Auditorium of the Italian Cultural Institute in the Japanese capital, was sold out. Under the artistic direction of Maestro Gaetano D'Espinosa, the Japanese audience experienced a musical journey through the opera and piano repertoire of great Italian and European composers, with a special focus on the encounter between the Western and Ottoman musical traditions.
The stars of the evening were Istanbul-born tenor Mert Süngü and Italian pianist and harpsichordist Chiara Cattani. The two artists performed a repertoire ranging from the operatic arias of Georg Friedrich Händel, Gioachino Rossini and Gaetano Donizetti, to the lesser-known but historically valuable compositions of Giuseppe Donizetti and Sultan Abdülaziz, witnesses to the intercultural exchange between the Ottoman East and European culture.
Highlights of the evening include the intense aria "Fatti tempesta e turbine" from Händel's Tamerlano, the virtuosic "Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête!" from Donizetti's La figlia del reggimento, characterised by the series of nine high Cs, and the famous "Cessa di più resistere" from Rossini's Barbiere di Siviglia. Interspersed with the operatic repertoire are a series of pieces for solo piano performed by Chiara Cattani, taken from the repertoire of Giuseppe Donizetti, Gaetano Donizetti's elder brother and called to Istanbul to reorganise the Ottoman Empire's military music, and Sultan Abdülaziz, the first to visit Europe and introduce elements of western culture into his empire.
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