Opera on 3: Alfredo Catalani: Edmea

Original version

BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Migrated podcast image for: Radio 3 Opera Guides

Opera on 3

Music: Classical: Opera

Programme presenting rare and fascinating operatic performances

Programme presenting rare and fascinating performances and vividly communicating the immediacy of the live experience

Alfredo Catalani: Edmea

BBC Radio 3 - Opera on 3, Alfredo Catalani: Edmea

Anne Sophie Duprels sings the title role in Wexford Festival Opera's production of Edmea.

A rare chance to hear Alfredo Catalani's penultimate opera Edmea – a tale of madness, love and loss – from 2021's Wexford Festival Opera. Anne Sophie Duprels sings the title role.

All over the world, year in, year out, opera houses put on a handful of operas from the standard repertory. For 70 years, however, Wexford Festival Opera has bucked that trend and the unlikely setting of a small town on Ireland's southeast coast has become the destination for opera lovers who want to see the operas no one else will stage and to be the first to hear singers on the threshold of international careers.

Among this season's rarities is Alfredo Catalani's Edmea. Overshadowed by his greatest hit La Wally, Edmea was Catalani's penultimate opera, based on an Alexandre Dumas play and premiered at La Scala, Milan, in 1886. It has many of the customary elements of the genre: a vulnerable orphan (Edmea), a love triangle, mistaken identity, forced marriage, madness, a castle and suicide (one attempted; one successful). But it does have a happy ending of sorts, when Edmea is able to marry her true love Oberto after her unwanted husband Ulmo shoots himself.

Recorded last month and presented by Sean Rafferty.

Alfredo Catalani: Edmea

Acts 1 & 2

7.50 pm
Sean Rafferty talks to soprano Anne Sophie Duprels about the challenges of the title role and asks conductor Francesco Cilluffo about Catalani's place in Italian operatic history.

8.00 pm
Act 3

Edmea.......Anne Sophie Duprels (soprano)
Il Conte di Leitmeritz.......Ivan Shcherbatykh (baritone)
Oberto.......Luciano Ganci (tenor)
Il Barone di Waldek.......John Molloy (bass)
Ulmo.......Leon Kim (baritone)
Fritz......Conor Prendiville (tenor)

Chorus and Orchestra of Wexford Festival
Francesco Cilluffo (conductor)

Image: © Clive Barda

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Opera on 3

Alfredo Catalani: Edmea

Genres

Brand

BBC Radio 3

About BBC Radio 3