UoS Music Presents | Basso profondo: Homage to Luigi Lablache

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the celebrated Neapolitan bass Luigi Lablache dominated the opera stages of Europe with a voice of extraordinary power and range, excelling in both comic and serious roles. This concert explores works for voice and piano composed for Lablache during the 1820s by two leading composers of the time—Gaetano Donizetti in Naples, and Franz Schubert in Vienna.

Donizetti’s Canto XXXIII is a veritable monument to Lablache’s voice drawing on one of the most poignant episodes from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, where Count Ugolino recounts of his and his children’s tragic imprisonment and death; Schubert’s three songs stand out for the variety of expressive moods and contrasts, ranging from sentimental to dramatic and, finally, to comedy.

Through these compositions we can get form a perception of Lablache’s unique voice and art, and, more broadly, of the dialogue between performer and composer in nineteenth-century vocal music. Riccardo Zanellato, one of today’s leading interpreters of nineteenth-century Italian opera, brings this music to life accompanied by Southampton’s professor of music Francesco Izzo.