Bio

Paolo V. Montanari assisted Graham Vick on Siegfried at Teatro Massimo di Palermo and L’inganno felice at Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro in 2015.

He debuted as a stage director with the first modern production of García Fajer’s intermezzo La finta schiava (1754) in the Teatro dei Concordi in Campiglia Marittima in 2007 with students of the Istituto Musicale “Orazio Vecchi” of Modena and Accademia delle Belle Arti of Florence. His productions as director include Calderón and Torrejón’s La púrpura de la rosa in the San Carlo Church in Modena and Pergolesi’s San Guglielmo d'Aquitania in the courtyard of the San Rocco Monastery in Carpi with the baroque ensemble Accademia degli Impossibili, Il barbiere di Siviglia and La traviata for Centro Lirico of Lignano Sabbiadoro, Don Pasquale for Associazione Cultura del Settecento in Bologna and Tosca for TeatrOperando in Bologna. In 2013 he created for the festivalfilosofia (Modena Philosophy Festival) Don Giovanni Trionfante, a project which won the the “Prime Visioni” competition held by Emilia Romagna Teatro. The show is inspired by Søren Kierkegaard’s Enten-Eller, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Gluck’s Don Juan, and it involves one actor, seven singers, an eleven-piece orchestra, seven dancers and an onstage videographer, combining and contrasting the languages of philosophy, opera, dance and video. In 2015 he wrote the libretto for L’opera contemporanea, a one-act comic opera with music by Adriano Gaglianello (unperformed).

Paolo V. Montanari graduated with a degree in Oboe with Luca Vignali and he studied Composition with Antonio Giacometti at the Istituto Superiore di Studi Musicali “Orazio Vecchi” in Modena. He also received a degree in Voice under the guidance of Tiziana Tramonti and continued his studies with Michael Aspinall, Alfonso Antoniozzi and Alessandro Corbelli. He studied ancient music repertoire with Monika Mauch, Giacomo Baroffio, Diego Fratelli and Accademia Bizantina. He worked as supernumerary in several productions. He has sung as a baritone in many opera productions, both as solo (Sagrestano in Tosca and Barone in Traviata) and chorus singer (Teatro Comunale di Modena, As.Li.Co and the TV movie Rigoletto a Mantova by Marco Bellocchio with Domingo and Mehta).

He graduated cum laude from the University of Bologna with a degree in Drama, with a thesis on his critical edition of the intermezzo La finta schiava (1754) by Francisco J. García Fajer. He was invited to participate to the congress on García Fajer organized by the University of Logroño and his paper was published in La ópera en el templo. Estudios sobre el compositor Francisco Javier García Fajer, Logroño, Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 2010. In 2015 he devised for the Teatro Comunale “Pavarotti” in Modena Don Giovanni in musica, two events with singers about the musical incarnations of myth of Don Juan and the genesis of Mozart’s opera. He worked as press office for Emilia Romagna Teatro.

As choir conductor in 2008 he founded Komos - Bologna’s Gay Men’s Chorus, which he conducted to the end of 2013, when he quit in order to concentrate on his activity as stage director. With Komos he conducted many concerts, some involving international opera singers such as Jessica Pratt and Marco Spotti, and he wrote Cenerentola Deluxe, a humorous contemporary version of Rossini’s Cenerentola narrated by the drag queen comedian Drusilla Foer, with notable Rossini singers such as Alfonso Antoniozzi, Giorgio Caoduro and Enea Scala. He arranged a vast array of music for the choir, he re-discovered some repertoire (first modern performance of some Banchieri motets) and he premiered pieces such as Ned Rorem’s Love Alone (Italian premiere), Antonio Giacometti’s Romeu e eu and Mattia Culmone’s Divo o mortale. He has been the founder and artistic director of the chamber music festival Komos&Co. and of the Komos Choral Composition Competition for new scores for male choir on a homoerotic text.

Language proficiency: Italian (native language), English (fluent), Spanish (fluent), French (intermediate), German (beginner)