Verdi's Luisa Miller from Midsummer Opera

Verdi's opera Luisa Miller remains a relative rarity on the operatic stage, and Midsummer Opera's performances of the work at St John's Church Waterloo on  23 & 25 March 2018 provide a welcome chance to experience the piece. David Roblou conducts a semi-staging with Stephen Holloway, John Upperton, Sian Woodling, Cheyney Kent, Andrew Major, and Emma Dogliani.

Luisa Miller was Verdi's 15th opera and is generally regarded as the first of his middle period operas, an important stepping stone which would lead to Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata. Prior to writing Luisa Miller for Naples, Verdi had spent a lot of time in Paris (his opera Jerusalem premiered there in 1847), and delays over agreements for the opera with Naples meant that Verdi had a longer time frame than usual for planning the piece and this results in greater influence from French opera in the work. Julian Budden comments that "the sensitive scoring, the flexibility of the musical forms, the growing importance of the role which Verdi assigned to the orchestra ... permits him to write two lengthy dialogue recitatives".

The libretto is based on the Friedrich Schiller play,Kabale und Liebe though the librettist Salvadore Cammarano transformed both the time period and the setting so that Schiller's aristocratic intrigues are moved to a Tyrolean village and the result is an exploration of bourgeois drama.

Full details from the Midsummer Opera website.