Placido Domingo & Svetla Vassileva .:. Ta Divna Splitska Noc

Biography Placido Domingo
Plácido Domingo is a world-renowned, multifaceted artist. Recognized as one of the finest and most influential singing actors in the history of opera, he is also a conductor and a major force as an opera administrator in his role as general director of two companies: LA Opera and Washington National Opera.

As a singer, his repertoire encompasses 134 roles, a number unmatched by any other tenor in history, with more than 3500 career performances. His more than 100 recordings of complete operas, compilations of arias and duets, and crossover discs include DG’s anthology of the complete Verdi arias for tenor and EMI’s albums of Wagnerian roles that he has not sung on stage: Siegfried in both Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, and Tristan in a complete recording of Tristan und Isolde.

His work in the recording studio has earned him 12 Grammy Awards, three of which are Latin Grammys, and he has made more than 50 music videos. In addition to three feature opera films — Carmen, La Traviata and Otello — he voiced the role of Monte in Disney’s Beverly Hills Chihuahua, played himself on The Simpsons, and his telecast of Tosca from the authentic settings in Rome was seen by more than one billion people in 117 different countries. His appearances around the world with his colleagues José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti in the now legendary The Three Tenors concerts are one of the great musical success stories of the 1990s.

He has conducted more than 450 opera performances and symphonic concerts with the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, Vienna Staatsoper, LA Opera, Chicago Symphony, Vienna Philharmonic, Montréal Symphony, National Symphony, London Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Berlin Philharmonic, among others.

In 1993, he founded the international voice competition Operalia. He recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of his debuts at the Met, La Scala and Verona.

During the past season he added the title role of Simon Boccanegra to his repertoire, with performances at the Met, La Scala, Covent Garden and in Madrid and Berlin. In August 2010, he added the title role in Rigoletto to his repertory in a concert performance in Beijing. He also performed the role in September for a performance of Rigoletto broadcast live on Italian TV from Mantua, where the opera is set; the performance will be shown on PBS during the 2011/12 season. For the 2010/11 season, his appearances include Pablo Neruda — his 134th role — in the world premiere of Daniel Catán’s Il Postino in Los Angeles (filmed for subsequent telecast and DVD release), with subsequent performances in Vienna and Paris, the title role in Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac in San Francisco, and Oreste in Iphigenie en Tauride in Madrid, Washington DC and at the Metropolitan Opera.

He also celebrated his 70th birthday with a gala concert, arranged by the king and queen of Spain, in his native city of Madrid.

His many conducting engagements for the season include Roméo et Juliette at the Metropolitan Opera, Le Nozze di Figaro in Los Angeles, and Madama Butterfly and Don Pasquale in Washington.

During the 2011/12 season, he will conduct Roméo et Juliette and sing the title role in Simon Boccanegra with LA Opera, and conduct Tosca at the Washington National Opera. Upcoming performances also include Neptune in The Enchanted Island at the Metropolitan Opera, where he will also conduct Madama Butterfly.

Svetla VassilevaBiography

Bulgarian soprano Svetla Vassileva makes her Seattle Opera debut as Alice Ford in Verdi’s Falstaff. She has sung Nedda in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci for Rome Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Arena di Verona, Royal Opera Covent Garden, and Teatro Bellini, as well as at the Ravenna Festival, and in Verona, Florence, and Geneva. Other performances include Liù in Puccini’s Turandot for Royal Opera Covent Garden, Los Angeles Opera, Vienna Staatsoper, San Francisco Opera, and New Israeli Opera; Violetta in Verdi’s Traviata at Covent Garden, and in Florence and Japan; Alice Ford in Bologna; Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin in Genoa; Mimì in Puccini’s Bohème and Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello at Teatro alla Scala; and the title role in Massenet’s Cendrillon in Geneva and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in Vienna and San Francisco. Her repertoire also includes Lisa in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, and the title roles in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, Suor Angelica, and Tosca, and Dvorák’s Rusalka. Future performances include Madama Butterfly in Trieste, Fidelia in Puccini’s Edgar in Bologna, and the title role in Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini in Paris.