Fabrizio Maria Carminati

Conductor Fabrizio Maria Carminati is a fixture of the Italian opera scene, both in theatrical performances and as a recording artist. He has an unusually large repertory of mostly but not exclusively Italian works. Carminati set out at first to be a pianist. He studied with the Milan-based teacher Carlo Pestalozza, who edited the widely used Ricordi editions of Bach's Inventions. Carminati switched to conducting and stayed in Milan for studies with a pair of composers, Davide Anzaghi and Vittorio Fellegara. Carminati made his conducting debut at the Teatro Regio in Turin in 1992, where he remained a frequent collaborator until 1999. He stayed on as a board member there at the request of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage, but from 2000 to 2004, he moved to the Donizetti Theater in Bergamo as the artistic director. He later held the same position at the Arena di Verona Foundation. Carminati kept up his conducting activities as a guest during this period, appearing at most of Italy's major opera houses. In the later part of his career, Carminati has appeared abroad with increasing frequency, leading performances at such houses as the Lyon Opera in France, the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville, Spain, and the Kansai Opera in Osaka, Japan. His large repertory includes more than 130 works, mostly Italian operas, but also includes ballets (Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and Adolphe Adam's Giselle) and symphonic works. Carminati has also become a popular attraction at summer festivals, including Germany's Rossini at Wildbad, where he led a performance of Rossini's rare Moisë et Pharaon (a substantial reworking of the earlier Mosè in Egitto) in 2018. Carminati has made a number of recordings, beginning with the anthology Le convenienze e inconvenienze teatrali on the Ricordi label in 1996. He has recorded mostly for small labels, among them Dynamic, Bongiovanni, and Concerto Classics. In 2020, his Rossini Moisë et Pharaon performance from Wildbad was released on the Naxos label. ~ James Manheim