BIOGRAPHY

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Francesco Izzo is a musicologist, pianist, and coach specialising in 19th-century opera and vocal music.  He is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton (United Kingdom), where he teaches courses and supervises research projects in opera, vocal performance practice, and textual criticism.  He is the author of the monograph Laughter between Two Revolutions: Opera buffa in Italy, 1831-1848 (University of Rochester Press) and serves as General Editor of the critical edition The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (University of Chicago Press and Casa Ricordi), for which he has edited Un giorno di regno.

As  pianist and passionate researcher of vocal performance practices of the 19th century, he has accompanied performances by Barry Banks, Rockwell Blake, Kevin Short, and Giuseppe Taddei, and has coached and consulted for countless more.  He recently accompanied to great acclaim soprano Lisette Oropesa in a recital for the Festival Verdi at Parma's Teatro Regio, as well as performances by Leo Nucci and Juan Jesús Rodriguez in Bilbao and by soprano Anna Pirozzi and  basses Michele Pertusi and Riccardo Zanellato in Parma, and tenor Antonio Poli in New York City. He has also performed widely as a soloist, with orchestra, and in a variety of chamber ensembles. 

Francesco is keen on forging bridges between performance and scholarship. Since 2014 he has been scholar-in-residence at Sarasota Opera, and since 2017 he has served as the principal scholarly advisor of Festival Verdi Parma, which in the first year of his scholarly leadership achieved the prestigious award for best festival at the International Opera Awards.  He has collaborated closely with Roberto Abbado during his tenure as the Festival's Music Director, and has consulted among others for conductors Daniele Callegari, Michele Mariotti, Francesco Pasqualetti, and Sebastiano Rolli, stage directors Hugo de Ana, Leo Muscato, and Graham Vick, as well as Anna Maria Chiuri, Annick Massis, Michele Pertusi, Piero Pretti, Ramon Vargas, Franco Vassallo, Riccardo Zanellato, and many other renowned singers.  He has lectured and contributed printed and media content  for many of the world’s leading opera companies and festivals, including the Salzburg Festival, the Glyndebourne Festival, the Donizetti Festival, the Royal Opera House, the Welsh National Opera, the Teatro La Fenice, and the opera houses of Bilbao, Madrid, Munich, Naples, Palermo, and Rome.

Francesco is frequently invited to deliver lectures, workshops, and masterclasses—including recent visits to the Juilliard School, Princeton University, Conservatorium Maastricht, and the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana.  During the Covid pandemic he remained committed to teaching and public engagement, leading online talks and activities for a variety of institutions and contributing as guest lecturer to Lisette Oropesa’s popular online masterclasses. In 2021 he was scholarly consultant at the Teatro real in Madrid for the premiere modern performance of Valentín de Zubiaurre’s Don Fernando el Emplazado, of which he has prepared the critical edition for the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales.

In 2023 he was appointed program director of the Accademia Verdiana, the young artists' program of the Teatro Regio in Parma, for which he has been teaching since 2018.  Plans for 2024-25 include teaching courses in opera and music history and supervision of PhD students at his home institution, the University of Southampton, masterclasses in Córdoba, lectures and concerts at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in New York City, the Teatro Mazzacorati in Bologna and Parma's Teatro Regio, as well as ongoing activity as scientific advisor of Festival Verdi.