Lorenzo Mariani

Lorenzo Mariani was born in New York, NY, and studied modern history at Harvard University. He made his opera staging debut with Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle at the Teatro Comunale in Florence, a project which marked the beginning of his subsequent regular collaboration with the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Festival. He has to his credit stagings for some of the world’s most prestigious opera houses and festivals, including Chicago’s Lyric Opera, San Francisco Opera, Finnish National Opera, Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv, Teatro Comunale in Bologna, Teatro Regio in Parma, Teatro Regio in Turin, Teatro Verdi in Trieste, Festival Donizetti in Bergamo, Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte summer festival in the Italian town of Montepulciano, Festival della Valle d’Itria in the Italian town of Martina Franca, and the opera festival in Wexford, Ireland. Among other venues he has worked in figure Geneva, Lausanne, Berne, Monte Carlo, Boston, Shanghai, and Tokyo.

Lorenzo Mariani has worked with many prominent conductors, including Daniele Gati (La bohème), Myung-Whun Chung (La bohème, Madama Butterfly), John Eliot Gardiner (Don Giovanni), Zubin Mehta (La forza del destino, Aida, Le nozze di Figaro), or Claudio Abbado (Don Giovanni). The list of his recent projects comprises productions of Lucio Dalla’s musical Tosca amore disperato, Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, and Brecht’s and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera for Rome’s Accademia di Santa Cecilia; Bernstein’s Candide for the Teatro San Carlo of Naples; Puccini’s Edgar for the Teatro Regio of Turin and Teatro Comunale of Bologna; Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana in a double bill with Leoncavallo’s I pagliacci for the Teatro Massimo of Palermo, Teatro Lirico of Cagliari, opera companies of Otsu and Tokyo, Japan, and the Savonlinna Opera Festival in Finland. In June 2010 he directed a new production of La fanciulla del West for San Francisco Opera, and the same staging will be mounted at Palermo’s Teatro Massimo on December 10, 2010, the day of the 100th anniversary of the work’s world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Since January 2005, Lorenzo Mariani has been artistic director of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo.