The singing actress – Anna Caterina Antonacci

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Anna Caterina Antonacci has electrified audiences in opera houses from Covent Garden to La Scala and in concert halls from the Concertgebouw to the Wigmore. As a singing actress with a magnetic stage presence, she embodies the tortured heroine of Berlioz’s dramatic scene for soprano and orchestra and the abandoned Ariadne in Haydn’s remarkably theatrical cantata. At the height of his career in the 1780s Haydn was commissioned to write six symphonies for performance in Paris, receiving a handsome fee and the enthusiastic applause of Queen Marie-Antoinette. Half a century later, Paris damned Berlioz’s Faust, but the King of Prussia, who sponsored the Berlin première, orchestrated one of the composer’s public triumphs: “Great success, great profit, great performances. Art in France is dead, so I must go where it is still to be found.”