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"Anna Caterina Antonacci chose the collection of works featured on this album. Four small masterpieces had been carefully preserved in her repertoire, year after year, like a constantly renewed love affair, with exactly the same admiration every time. These four very different pieces have become the four highlights of our show, Er la Notte. (...) I imagine scenes from a woman's life. We guess that she's lost forever, probably because of love. (...) A lovesick woman (La Pazza), a woman abandoned (Lamento d'Ariana), one longing for death as the only solution (Lagrime Mie), and an ambiguous visionary foreseeing the fatal dramas and misunderstandings of love (Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda)." Juliette Deschamps With a long career in the theatre, Juliette Deschamps was responsible for the staging and lighting of Anna Caterina Antonacci's musical Era la Notte, which featuring songs and music identical to those on this recording.
Born in Ferrara, Anna Caterina Antonacci won the Verdi Competition in Parma in 1987, and the Maria Callas and the Pavarotti International Competitions in 1988. In 1990 and in 2005 the Italian Critics’ Association awarded her the Premio Abbati.
Embracing both soprano and mezzo-soprano roles, her extraordinary vocal timbre and great acting skills have enabled her to perform many works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries including Monteverdi (L'incoronazione di Poppea, Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda with Abbado and Ivor Bolton), Purcell (Dido and Aeneas), Handel (Rodelinda with Christie, Agrippina with Jacobs), Gluck (Armide), Paisiello (Nina, o sia La pazza per amore) with Muti, and Mozart (Fiordiligi, Dorabella, Donna Elvira with Abbado, and Donna Elvira with Muti).
She has made a speciality of singing Rossini roles, including La Cenerentola and Il barbiere di Siviglia in the opera buffa category, and in opera seria such works as Ermione, Semiramide, Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra, Mosè in Egitto, and La donna del lago. She has had equal success with Bellini (Adalgisa, Norma; Romeo, I Capuleti e i Montecchi), Donizetti (Elisabetta, Maria Stuarda), which she sang with Frittoli, Verdi (Un giorno di regno), Bizet (Carmen), Massenet (Dulcinée, Don Quichotte; Charlotte, Werther), Stravinsky (Pulcinella).
She has sung in contemporary works including the world premieres of Tre veglie by FabioVacchi at the Salzburg Festival and the title role in Vita by Marco Tutino at La Scala, Milan.
Anna Caterina Antonacci has sung with all the major conductors including Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Chailly, William Christie, Sir Andrew Davis, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, René Jacobs, Sir Charles Mackerras and Riccardo Muti.
She has recently concentrated on the soprano repertory. In the 2003/04 season, she scored notable personal successes as Cassandre in Les Troyens with Sir John Eliot Gardiner at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Elettra in Idomeneo for the Netherlands Opera and the Maggio Musicale in Florence, and Anna in Marschner’s Hans Heiling in Cagliari.
Her recent engagements have included L'incoronazione di Poppea with Jacobs at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and Palais Garnier in Paris, and Alceste for the Opera di Regio in Parma and the Salzburg Festival.
Her operatic projects include La Juive at the Opéra de Paris and Vitellia in La clemenza di Tito at the Grand Théâtre in Geneva and the Opéra de Paris, Carmen conducted by Antonio Pappano at Covent Garden, Cassandre in Les Troyens at the Grand Théâtre in Geneva, Falstaff (Alice) at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and Medea at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo. In 2006, she will give a recital in homage to Pauline Viardot at the Châtelet in Paris and the Wigmore Hall in London, then sing the Nuits d'été of Berlioz with Sir Colin Davis at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris.
Anna Caterina Antonacci now records exclusively for the Naïve label.
