Freshness & energy: Victoria Stevens on her new Le nozze di Figaro at the New Generation Festival in Florence

The New Generation Festival at the Palazzo Corsini, Florence

The New Generation Festival (co-founders Maximilian Fane & Roger Granville) takes place in the grounds of the Palazzo Corsini in Florence and is intended to showcase the best of young operatic talent. This year's festival runs from 28-31 August 2019, and features a new production of Mozart's La nozze di Figaro directed by Victoria Stevens and conducted by Jonathan Santagrada. Victoria is a young director currently working at National Theatre, Mannheim and I spoke to her via Skype to find out what we can expect this Summer.

Victoria Stevens

The production will feature a young cast (Daniel Miroslaw as Figaro, Anna El-Khashem as Susanna, Faik Mansuroglu as the Count, Nela Saric as the Countess, Sara Rocchi as Cherubino) and Victoria plans to take advantage of this to bring the sort of freshness and energy to the piece which the story needs.

The setting will be a 1930s film studio such as Paramount from the Golden Age of Film. Victoria has chosen this because she wanted to take advantage of the setting, the villa and its terrace, rather than building something to hide it. The Palazzo Corsini is a 17th & 18th century Baroque building still owned by the princely family, and its facade and the setting evoked, for Victoria, a film set. One of the main themes of Mozart's opera is the dynamics between men and women, and Hollywood of the period was riddled with pretence so it seemed an appropriate way to express the themes of the story. The production will make use of a lot of black and white film projections.

Another theme of the opera is the relationships between different levels in society, and the production brings this out via the film theme with the Count as the film producer, the Countess as his leading lady, Figaro as the cinematographer etc. Something that Victoria feels works out nicely.