Gran Galà Lirico – Chiesa di San Giovanni

 14 September 2020

As the poster shows, this was an event carefully planned within the church of San Giovanni on 14 September 2020. Lucca was still under some Covid 19 restrictions, particularly for indoor events that required advanced booking for seats. Audience numbers were limited due to social distancing and all the other precautions such as the now ubiquitous face masks, obligatory hand sanitising, temperature checks etc.

The commune of Lucca needs little reason to display live music but the focus of this particular concert was the greatly reduced special annual event of the Illuminata and the procession of the Volto Santo through the candle-lit streets between San Frediano and the Duomo. Lucca’s famous Summer Festival that was to include live concerts from international stars such as Sir Paul McCartney was postponed to 2021. Also, seasonal Puccini concerts were severely restricted as well as the normal itinerant street musicians and buskers in Lucca’s piazzas. As the poster reveals, this operatic concert was dedicated to the memory of Maria Pia Bertolucci who was an important figure at the National Centre for Volunteering, since San Martino is the patron saint of Volunteers.

Since tickets would be at a premium for the gala concert, I managed to obtain fourteen seats from the musical director and organiser Andrea Colombini for a group of friends.

Pleasingly, a glance at the programme shows that a large part of the music were arias composed by Lucca’s famous son Giacomo Puccini. In addition, there were arias by Giuseppe Verdi and two beautiful pieces of orchestration from the opera Cavalleria Rusticana composed by Livorno-born Pietro Mascagni. Also included were two pieces by French composer Georges Bizet from his famous opera Carmen first performed in 1875.

Singing at the concert were two local performers, sopranos Silvana Froli and Deborah Vincenti, with the male vocals provided by tenor Giovanni Cervelli. New to Lucca and singing for the first was the English mezzo-soprano Olympia Hetherington who had recently become a friend to our ex-pat group in Lucca and who had gained a ‘fan-base’ by singing in a domestic setting at friends Jim and Sheri’s apartment. Olympia’s CV is impressive, as a chorister at Salisbury Cathedral, graduating from Jesus College, Cambridge with a degree in Classics, holding several important administrative roles, she has for the last two years dedicated herself to singing and performing in several operas, a career move she hopes to continue.

Supporting the singing was an ensemble called Gli Ottoni di Toscana, that literally translates as ‘The Brass of Tuscany’. Composed of eight various brass instruments, they played several instrumental pieces whilst backing the vocalists. Whilst a softer orchestral string section would have been a more normal accompaniment to voices, the brass was an interesting addition. Many in the audience felt that at times the singers had to compete with the overpowering brass that gave an overall sound that appeared out of balance.

The concert was a welcome musical evening that has attempted to bring an audience back into the church of San Giovanni that in normal times the daily concerts provided by Puccini e la sua Lucca would perform to thousands of tourists during the summer.