Marcello Lippi

Siegen and Kerkrade were stops on the Plovdiv Philharmonic Orchestra's 2008 tour, and Marcello Lippi was among the soloists heard in both, on programmes that also brought forward Won Jang, Ernesto Grisales, Wasgen Gazarian and Elena Tchavdarova-Issa. Born in Genoa, he took his diploma at the city's Paganini Conservatory, a degree with highest marks from the Istituto Braga in Teramo, and a degree in modern literature at the University of Genoa; it was at the Genoa conservatory, by his own account, that he began singing and listening to opera. Beside singing he has worked as stage director, writer and teacher, and as artistic director of the Teatro Verdi in Pisa, where a thirteen-month festival, Una gigantesca follia, closed in 2015 with seven operatic settings of Don Giovanni — by Mozart, Melani, Dargomyzhsky, Scarlatti, Gazzaniga, Tritto and Pacini — beside prose versions, ballets, concerts and more than twenty lectures. A second Pisa festival followed, on the Faust myth, with a programme announced to include Gounod, Boito, Hindemith, Puccini and Gluck.