An Azerbaijani conductor has been invited to perform at the 42nd Feodor Chaliapin International Opera Festival held in Kazan, Tatarstan.

Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca was successfully performed at the festival under the baton of the principal conductor and musical director of the Azerbaijani State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, Honoured Artist Ayyub Guliyev, Azernews reports.

Giacomo Puccini's masterpiece

Tosca is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa.

Its premier took place at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on January 14, 1900. The work, based on Victorien Sardou's 1887 French-language dramatic play, La Tosca, is a melodramatic piece set in Rome in June 1800, with the Kingdom of Naples's control of Rome threatened by Napoleon's invasion of Italy.

The opera contains some of Puccini's best-known lyrical arias. Being one of the best opera classics, Tosca is still very popular and is in the repertoire of the opera house.

"Tosca" opera first appeared on the festival's poster in 1994, and then for a long time, this performance graced the theater's repertoire. A new appeal to Puccini's masterpiece took place in 2022 by the famous Russian director Yuri Alexandrov.

All tickets for the opera production were sold out several weeks before the performance. The audience greeted the Azerbaijani conductor and opera singer with a storm of applause.

Note that Honoured Artist Ayyub Guliyev has successfully collaborated with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (United Kingdom), Hamburg Klassik (Germany), the Vienna Chamber Orchestra, Wiener Consilium (Austria), Toscanini Philharmonic (Italy), Kolors Symphony Orchestra (Greece), Danube Symphony Orchestra (Hungary), Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra (Croatia) orchestra (Croatia), etc.