Carmela Remigio

Soprano Carmela Remigio has been a fixture of the operatic scene in Italy since the early 1990s, and she has also performed abroad. Remigio's career is notable in that it began early for a singer; by her late teens she was singing major roles and winning important prizes. Remigio was born in Pescara, Italy, in 1973. She studied the violin as a child but switched to voice after taking lessons with veteran baritone Aldo Protti at the local Accademia Musicale Pescarese. She went on to study with pianist and conductor Leone Magiera. By 1992, Remigio was already gaining important recognition for her talents: she won the Luciano Pavarotti International Voice Competition in Philadelphia that year, and in 1993 she made her operatic debut in a world premiere (unusual for a 20-year-old singer), Giampaolo Testoni's Alice, at the Teatro Massimo of Palermo. However, for the first part of her career she was associated with Mozart roles, performing them around Italy. Remigio caught the attention of major figures in the operatic world. She performed under conductor Claudio Abbado at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, in productions staged by director Peter Brook. She continued to work with Abbado in new productions of Verdi's Falstaff (as Mrs. Ford) and Otello (in the lead role of Desdemona). In the 2010s, Remigio's repertory expanded into bel canto opera and back into the Baroque as far as Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea. She appeared in virtually all of the top Italian opera houses, including La Scala, but remains better known in Italy than elsewhere. Remigio has appeared on several recordings, and the year 2019 saw her featured on a pair of releases on the Dynamic label, both featuring operatic rarities: the Neapolitan pastiche version of Handel's Rinaldo with music added by Leonardo Leo, and Donizetti's Il castello di Kenilworth (1829). ~ James Manheim