Coinciding with the City of Knoxville’s Italian week and Knoxville Opera’s Rossini Festival, the School of Music will host Italian soprano Manuela Formichella at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 24, in a guest performance of The Music of Tosti: Love Songs of Southern Italy in Alumni Memorial Building Performance Hall I, room 32. Formichella will also lead a master class with UT voice students the next day.
Formichella is an authority on the music of Francesco Paolo Tosti (1846 – 1916) and will perform Tosti’s Italian salon music. Both she and the composer are from the same region – Gulianova, Italy. Formichella is nationally renowned in her country, and is currently a faculty member of the Conservatory L. D’Annunzio of Pescara, Italy. For more info, visit her website.
Formichella also will premiere a new work entitled Vorrei, written by assistant professor Brendan McConville, which he describes as “a re-setting of a Tosti work by the same name,” and “a modern homage to 19th century Italian salon music.”