Celebrity Opera
Angela Gheorghiu

Artists

Angela Gheorghiu made her international debut in 1992 at Royal Opera House Covent Garden with La Bohème. In the same year she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera New York and at the Vienna State Opera. It was in the Royal Opera House Covent Garden that she first sang her much acclaimed La Traviata in 1994, when the BBC cleared out its schedules to broadcast the opera. At one rehearsal the conductor Sir Georg Solti said: “I was in tears. I had to go out. The girl is wonderful. She can do everything.” The performance was also filmed and recorded by Decca. Newspapers and magazines noticed that “A star is born”.

Since then Ms Gheorghiu has been in constant demand in opera houses and concert halls around the world: New York, London, Paris, Salzburg, Berlin, Tokyo, Rome, Seoul, Venice, Athens, Monte Carlo, Chicago, Philadelphia,(with Philadelphia Orchestra) Sao Paolo, Los Angeles, Lisbon, Valencia, Palermo, Balbeck, Amsterdam, Kuala Lumpur, Zürich, Vienna, Salzburg, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Prague, Montreal, Moscow, Taipei, San Juan, Ljubljana.

All these performances and recitals have confirmed Ms. Gheorghiu’s status as one of the most beloved stars of opera. Future engagements include various concerts across the globe as well as opera performances in Berlin (La bohème), Vienna, London, and Hamburg (Tosca).

Alexandra Dariescu is an original voice on the piano repertoire, championing and premiering lesser-known works, while shining a light on gender equality. In demand as a soloist worldwide, she has performed with renowned orchestras such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, Oslo Philharmonic and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, under conductors including Adam Fischer, Cristian Măcelaru, Fabien Gabel, Jun Märkl, Vasily Petrenko, Ryan Bancroft, James Gaffigan, Jonathon Heyward, JoAnn Falletta and Michael Francis.
 
This season, Dariescu makes her debut with Orchestre Symphonique de la Monnaie under Alain Altinoglu on La Monnaie’s 250th anniversary. Holding three Artist-in-Residence titles, she starts at Pfalztheater-Kaiserslautern in Germany, where she explores fascinating juxtapositions between male and female composers, illuminating an inclusive picture of various artistic movements. In Canada, she returns to Orchestre Symphonique de Québec and Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, and in the US she debuts with the Richmond Symphony Orchestra as their Artist-in-Residence, followed by the Florida Orchestra. For her third Residency this season, she returns to Iserlohn’s Internationale Herbsttage für Musik. 
 
Recent highlights include debuts with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the US premiere of Nadia Boulanger’s ‘Fantaisie Variee’ with the Houston Symphony and Ireland’s National Symphony Orchestra, whilst upcoming debuts include the George Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra and Real Filharmonía de Galicia. Most recently, Dariescu made the world premiere recording of the newly discovered piano concerto by Leokadiya Kashperova with the BBC Symphony Orchestra for BBC Radio 3.
 
In 2017 she took the world by storm with her own project “The Nutcracker and I.” Running in its sixth year, this season she tours it in the UK, Germany and Greece; “Nutcracker” is an original ground-breaking multimedia performance for piano solo with live dance and digital animation. She has drawn thousands of young audiences into concert halls across Europe, Australia, China, the Emirates and the US with it, realizing her vision of building bridges and making classical music more accessible to the wider public.

Alexandru Tomescu is the artist for whom music has no limits: ready to play the most difficult scores in marathon concerts, in month-long tours, the violinist is unanimously appreciated by the audiences all over the world. In 2007, Alexandru won the right to play the Stradivarius Elder-Voicu 1702 violin, which belongs to the Romanian State and promised to make its sound heard by all Romanians. The Stradivarius International Tour has thus become one of the most popular classical music events in Romania and this year its XVI edition.

After a fruitful career at halls such as Théâtre des Champs Elysees – Paris, Carnegie Hall – New York and Metropolitan Arts Centre – Tokyo, appearing with conductors such as Valery Gergiev, Kurt Masur or Christoph Eschenbach, Alexandru came back to Romania, where he committed himself to reinventing his identity with a radical change.

He understood that the non-conventional seen as a combination between professionalism and innovation is the key to accessing a larger public demonstrating that classical music is a window towards harmony between people -- a world open to everyone, and that all deserve the chance to explore it.

He played his Stradivarius in a subway station and later in a forest to state his position concerning the exploitation of the Romanian woods. He played in front of a house in ruins to protest the destruction of Romania’s National Heritage buildings and he played to raise funds for the Romanian Association for the Blind or for helping deaf children obtain hearings aids. He is among the first Romanian artists who made a mission out of taking the message of classical music into towns where there are no philharmonic orchestras. His name on a poster is enough to sell all the tickets days before the event.

“Alexandru Tomescu makes uncommon music out of Paganini’s Caprices, playing up contrasts, letting each phrase live and breathe. I expected an evening of champagne bubbles. Tomescu serves up whiskey.” (David Larsen – Metro Magazine, New Zealand).