The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, directed by Richard Eyre with Kristine Opolais in the title role, which premieres on February 12, will be conducted by Fabio Luisi, the lean, elegant Italian who for the last decade has been steadily delivering great sound from the pit. Enlisted by General Manager Peter Gelb, Luisi started at the Met with Verdi’s Don Carlos in 2005, rose to principal guest conductor in 2010, and was signed to a five-year contract as principal conductor in 2011, after he took over the last two operas of Robert Lepage’s production of Wagner’s Ring cycle for an ailing James Levine. He promptly received a Grammy for Best Opera Recording. This season—his next to last as principal conductor—he is also doing Cavalleria Rusticana/Paglacci and The Marriage of Figaro. Like Levine, he has proved, over 20-some productions, that he is comfortable with all the great composers, from Mozart to Berg.
I recently sat down to discuss some of his other facets with this remarkable man, who in person is modest, impeccably turned out, and immensely likable. Born in Genoa, he studied piano and worked first as an accompanist, which led to conducting. Major posts have included the MDR Symphony in Leipzig (1996-2007), the Staatskapelle and Semperoper in Dresden (2007-2010), and the Vienna Symphony (2005-2013).
Luisi and his wife, Barbara, a violinist, maintain an apartment in New York for the three months of the year he is conducting at the Met and making guest appearances with other orchestras. They have three sons: the oldest, 27, is a physicist in Munich; the next, 23, is a medical student in Vienna; the youngest, 18, is in school in Zurich. Their parents’ kitchen serves as a laboratory for their second careers. Barbara is a photographer, and Fabio is a “nose,” who five years ago began creating perfume, which he sees as blending scents, much in the way a conductor blends sounds. He told me it takes 15 to 18 trials—“there’s always room for improvement”—to come up with one of his distinctive, marketable perfumes, which have such names as as Reve de Roses and Ombre et Lumiere, and can be purchased at the Met’s Opera Shop and through flparfums.com. When I asked him if he made cologne for men, he replied, “Perfume is unisex.”
Profits from the perfume sales go to the Luisi Academy for Music and Visual Arts, which is associated with the annual Festival Valle d’Itria, located in the middle of the “heel” of Italy. Luisi has coached young singers there every summer since 1978, and in 2015 he was made music director. He is happy to report that this year they will record La Donna Serpente, by Alfredo Casella, a 20th-century Italian composer who has been too long neglected, in Luisi’s opinion.
When his Met contract ends in 2017, Luisi plans to devote himself even more fully to his native country, which he believes has a sad history of losing its top conductors. He has just been named music director designate of the Opera di Firenze and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, and he has high hopes that Florence, given its new opera house, which opened in 2011, and its superb concert hall, will soon have the only European musical festival comparable to Salzburg’s. He said in a recent public statement, “We all know that Italian musical institutions are in a kind of crisis, but I think this is exactly the moment we should show—especially me as an Italian conductor—a commitment to…help these institutions come out of this crisis and show new opportunities and perspectives.”
That’s still not all. Luisi will continue as general music director of the Zurich Opera, a post he has held since 2012, until 2022. He has also been named principal conductor designate of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, a position he will assume next year. Hard to believe, but the man is only 57. And looks 45.
