Florence, home of the Maggio Musicale. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The Maggio Musicale Fiorentino has presented its 2027 season, which coincides with the eighty-ninth edition of Italy’s oldest festival, and the design is clear from the numbers alone: twelve opera titles, seven new productions, twenty symphonic concerts, and at the centre music director Daniele Gatti, who takes on three new productions in a single year. Trovatore directed by Leo Muscato, Strauss’s Elektra entrusted to the theatrical eye of Stéphane Braunschweig, and a Don Giovanni with Daniele Menghini: Verdi, Strauss and Mozart in the same year are a declaration of total repertoire, and Gatti adds six symphonic concerts and a complete Bruckner cycle spread over two seasons.
Around the conductor’s triptych, the programme works through intelligent contrasts. The real rarity is Il mondo alla roversa by Baldassarre Galuppi, the Venetian of Goldoni, conducted by Chiara Cattani: eighteenth-century music theatre that is never heard, and exactly the kind of rediscovery a festival should allow itself by statute. Wagner and the English twentieth century share the podium: Tristan und Isolde conducted by Alexander Soddy in Keith Warner’s staging and Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Ivor Bolton, staged by Deborah Warner. Bel canto holds the centre with Norma conducted by Stefano Montanari, who promises a period-instrument reading, and Anna Bolena with Michele Spotti; Traviata, Adriana Lecouvreur, and two titles in concert form, Tosca with Frizza and Macbeth with Luisotti, complete the bill.
Two notes from our desk. The first: with Anna Bolena both in Florence and at La Scala with Muti in the same year, 2027 promises to be the Donizetti year of comparisons, and audiences who can afford the journey will do well to hear both: two schools of conducting on the same title are the best lesson in interpretation available on the market. The second is applause for the pricing policy: the theatre has confirmed unchanged rates, like La Fenice. When two foundations out of two choose to take risks on repertoire without passing the risk on to the ticket, something in the system is moving in the right direction. Sources: official presentation of the 2027 season, Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, June 2026.