A couple of years ago, some influential boosters began exploring the idea of building an opera house in Naples. An integral component of the project, called Theater in the Garden, is a museum dedicated to the artistry of Luciano Pavarotti.
Rather than wait for the opera house and museum to be built, Opera Naples and the late tenor’s wife, Nicoletta Mantovani, decided to begin working together immediately.
“We started the collaboration already last season with a concert that was called Pavarotti Forever,” Opera Naples Artistic and Music Director Ramon Tebar explained. “She loved it in Naples. She has met a lot of donors. Some of them are becoming friends of Nicoletta.”
Mantovani directs the Luciano Pavarotti Foundation. She and Tebar are now expanding its partnership with Opera Naples
“As part of this expansion, we are bringing back two important projects,” Tebar said.
The first is an academy to develop the next generation of young opera singers. It will be named the Luciano Pavarotti Foundation Opera Naples Academy.
“Students will have the opportunity to sing for the first time with a real orchestra,” Tebar noted.
In fact, the application deadline for the academy just closed. From some 200 submissions, a jury will select a student body of between eight and 12 singers on November 15. They’ll come to Naples, begin training and participate in two performances in January.
The second part of the expansion resurrects The Luciano Pavarotti International Voice Competition - a project that Pavarotti conducted in Philadelphia in the 1980s and '90s.
“The competition will take place at Florida Gulf Coast University,” Tebar noted. “We are very, very grateful to them, and particularly to Dr. Krzysztof Biernacki [Director of the Bower School of Music & the Arts], who also is very involved with the opera company because he is part of our board.”
The Bower School of Music is ideal because the 196-seat U. Tobe Recital Hall features superb acoustics, a generous stage, good sightlines, and plush seating with ample personal space.
“We are even aiming to stream the finals, and we will open it also to the general audience so the community can have access to hear, to listen to these singers in concert in the finals, where we will announce the winners,” said Tebar.
Not one, but four winners will be named. Each will receive one or more performance contracts totaling a minimum of $10,000 in compensation. Tebar shares the strategy underlying these awards.
“We all know that singers when they start their careers, they need money to pay for their studies, for the trips, the coaches,” Tebar observed. “But also at the same time they need contracts. When you give a contract to a young artist, they’re getting experience, they can put that experience on their resume and they’re building their own network.”
One contract pays them to perform on opening night at the Opera Naples Festival Under the Stars.
“They will come and perform in Naples at the festival, a concert with full orchestra, all four of them, the winners. And in collaboration with Boca Raton, with the Festival of the Arts in Boca, we will bring the same concert with the whole orchestra the following day and, together with Nicoletta Pavarotti, which will host and introduce the concert to the audience in Meisner Park.”
Nicoletta Mantovani will be present throughout the Festival Under the Stars, which runs from February 27 through March 15, 2025.
These collaborations don’t just further the construction of a world class opera house and Pavarotti Museum. They place Naples, Florida, on the world opera stage.
“I remember 10 years ago when I would tell people I’m Music Director in Naples, the would always go ‘ah, Naples, Italy,’ Tebar said. “After two or three years, all singers or people in the music world they know that Opera Naples is an important opera company where the greatest artists are coming here to perform in a very supportive community.”
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Opera Naples currently performs at One Opera Center, a 300-plus seat black box theater in the heart of Naples. However, it is capable of filling a much larger venue, such as the 900-seat opera house being envisioned by Theater in the Garden.
Theater in the Garden “put us in contact with Nicoletta Pavarotti because not only would Theater in the Garden build an opera house, but also a museum centered around the figure of Luciano Pavarotti, one of the greatest opera singers of all time,” said Tebar.
Of course, there is a Pavarotti museum in the tenor’s hometown of Modena, Italy. It goes by the name of the Luciano Pavarotti Home Museum. A museum in Naples would be the first in North America.
“Nicoletta is even considering making Naples the American home of the Luciano Pavarotti Foundation,” Opera Naples Artistic and Music Director Ramon Tebar added.
The Luciano Pavarotti Foundation Opera Naples Academy is actually the outgrowth of a similar academy that Opera Naples established six years ago with Italian opera singer Renata Scotto. Unfortunately, the academy was suspended during the pandemic and abandoned after Scotto died in 2023.
“Meeting Nicoletta rekindled the excitement we had with Renata Scotto, and so we discussed why not bring back the academy, linking it this time with the Luciano Pavarotti Foundation,” Tebar explained.
The eight to 12 students chosen to participate in the academy will perform a role in a full-scale opera to the accompaniment of an actual orchestra. To get them ready, Opera Naples is bringing in some of the top opera teachers and artists in the world, such as Sherrill Milnes (an American baritone known for his Verdi roles and who was associated with the Metropolitan Opera from 1965 to 1997), Carrie-Ann Matheson (San Francisco Opera Artistic Director) and Maria Zouves (Executive Director of the Sherrill Milnes VOICE Program in Savannah).
As an added bonus, Nicoletta Mantovani will be part of the jury that selects the students who will be admitted into the academy, and she will direct a roundtable with them.
“This is an incredible opportunity for those [students] to be able to sing, some of them for the first time in their life, a whole operatic role with orchestra in front of a live audience and learn from such luminaries in the operatic world,” Tebar added.
And that’s the payoff for the students who are accepted into the academy — the experience, contacts and a line on their resume. The payday for the winners of The Luciano Pavarotti International Voice Competition will be performance contracts.
“We share the mission of the Luciano Pavarotti Foundation that some of the most important things we can do for the next generation of singers is to teach them and support them,” said Tebar. “In the case of the academy, we will support them by giving them the opportunity to sing with an orchestra, which is not very often the case in universities. But in the case of the competition, it’s going to be with money in the form of performance contracts.”
By supporting the four competition winners in this way, Tebar hopes they will “always think of Opera Naples as a place which believed in their talent and helped them when they were starting out.”
That may induce them to return to Naples as their careers progress, and refer Opera Naples to their colleagues and the artistic directors and other opera professionals they encounter along the way.
Not only will the four winners of The Luciano Pavarotti International Voice Competition perform on the first night of the Festival Under the Stars, but also they will get to meet Nicoletta Mantovani, who will be present throughout the festival and is scheduled to give a lecture on the artistic mission of the Luciano Pavarotti Foundation.
Spanish Conductor Ramón Tebar is currently principal conductor and artistic director of Opera Naples and artistic director of Spain’s Arantzazu Festival. He was previously artistic and music director of the Orquesta de Valencia, artistic director of the Florida Grand Opera and principal guest conductor of Valencia’s Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia.
Some of Tebar’s guest appearances in the opera pit include engagements at the San Francisco Opera with Elisir d’Amore, at the Hamburg State Opera with Don Pasquale, at the Opéra National de Lorraine with I Capuleti e i Montecchi, the Vienna State Opera (Madama Butterfly, La Bohème, Turandot, Don Pasquale), Gran Teatre del Liceu (L’Elisir d’Amore), the Cincinnati Opera (Carmen, Roméo et Juliette, Turandot), the Royal Swedish Opera (La Cenerentola), the Deutsche Oper Berlin (Madama Butterfly), the Gothenburg Opera (Tosca and Rigoletto), the Savonlinna Festival (Carmen), in Pamplona’s Baluarte Theater (Otello), the Teatro Regio di Parma (Giovanna d’Arco), the Ópera de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Rigoletto, Simon Boccanegra), Teatro Lirico di Cagliari (I Puritani), Teatro Regio Torino (L’Italiana in Algeri), Teatro Villamarta (Tosca), Mexico City’s Palacio Bellas Artes (Falla’s La Vida Breve and Moncayo’s La Mulata de Córdoba), the Palacio de la Ópera de a Coruña (West Side Story, Un Ballo in Maschera), and the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo (Carmen).
As a music director Tebar has led productions of La Traviata, Aida, Nabucco, Don Carlo (Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia); Madama Butterfly, La Bohème, Florencia en el Amazonas, Carmen, Un Ballo in Maschera, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Don Pasquale, Cosí Fan Tutte, Lucia di Lammermoor, La Sonnambula, Thaïs, La Rondine and M.D. Levy’s Mourning Becomes Electra (Florida Grand Opera); Aida, Turandot, Die Zauberflöte, Die Fledermaus, Don Pasquale, La Traviata, La Bohème, Cosí Fan Tutte, Maria de Buenos Aires, La Tragedie de Carmen, Haydn’s L’isola disabitata, and Daniel Catán La Hija de Rappaccini (Opera Naples).