A walk of less than thirty minutes can take you from the Teatro Real, through the austere beauty of the early-seventeenth-century Plaza Mayor, to the neoclassical domain of the Prado, nearby El Retiro Park and the Reina Sofía, housed in a former eighteenth-century hospital.The important variables here were the principals, one of whom was making her company debut (soprano Nino Machaidze as Gilda) while another (tenor Pene Pati) was taking his first crack at the role of Gilda’s feckless lover, the Duke of Mantua. Luisotti’s orbit includes the extraordinary trio of museums, the Prado, Reina Sofía and the Thyssen-Bornemisza, encompassing the contrasting historical and architectural styles of the capital city, from the Hapsburg dynasty of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the succeeding Bourbon monarchs.

Luisotti enjoys walking through the city’s grand boulevards, plazas and parks. Though Madrid is a great European metropolis-“a city with an open mind” he says-its “centro” is relatively compact. During the Rigoletto run, he and his wife, Rita, occupied an apartment with views of the terraced, neoclassical Sabatini Gardens, adjacent to the Royal Palace, which-like the opera house-is located at the Plaza de Oriente. Still, for him, Madrid is far more than a place to work. Though Luisotti occasionally goes out after a performance, he prefers a quiet evening with his wife or friends.

Madrileños keep famously late hours at such legendary haunts as Bar Cock, a nexus for intellectuals, artists, bullfighters and royalty since the 1920s (Luis Buñuel, Ernest Hemingway, Ava Gardner, Pedro Almodóvar), or the recent Only You Hotel, with its bar-cum-lounge featuring more than thirty types of gin. ' N ICOLA LUISOTTI, MUSIC DIRECTOR of San Francisco Opera, has just completed a January run of Rigoletto at Madrid’s Teatro Real at the time of our interview.

The Italian-born maestro loves to work and relax in the SPANISH CAPITAL.įeatured in the April 2016 issue of Opera News:

Rigoletto sf opera