– The Spanish tenor, one of the most important of his generation, will take on the iconic role of Rigoletto, a character he has carried to stages across half the world.
February 2025 He has sung it in theatres such as Madrid’s Teatro Real, the Ópera de Oviedo, Seville’s Teatro de la Maestranza, the Palau de les Arts in Valencia, the Wiener Staatsoper, the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, La Fenice in Venice, Genoa’s Carlo Felice, the Verdi Festival in Parma, the San Carlo in Naples, the Teatro Verdi in Salerno, the Comunale in Bologna, the Macerata Opera Festival, and Les Chorégies d’Orange, among many others. Yet Celso Albelo’s Duca di Mantova is today, without a doubt, a character he considers “very different from the one I debuted in Busseto in 2006,” he admits. “Having sung it in such varied productions and alongside so many different maestros has allowed this detestable role to grow with me in a natural way. My conception of him has evolved over the years, and to me he’s a real ‘bad guy’—very fashionable nowadays—because he holds great power, knows it, and exploits it. I consider myself fortunate to have the chance to revisit a role over such a long span of time, because far from boring you or pushing you into routine, it activates the mind to offer the audience something new. I’m delighted to take it on again because I know I still have much to say about this villain, and I couldn’t imagine a better way to do it than by returning to the stage of the Maggio Musicale in Florence, a theatre I remember with great affection and that has given me so much joy,” he says.
Although Celso Albelo has spent two decades excelling in the operas of the romantic bel canto repertoire, with Donizetti and Bellini at the forefront, his voice has also allowed him to venture into Verdi’s world—a repertoire he has gradually embraced throughout his career. Alongside the Duke in Rigoletto, he has taken on roles such as Alfredo in La Traviata and Riccardo in Un ballo in maschera, to which he has added, in recent seasons, weightier lyric roles like Macduff in Macbeth and Manrico in Il Trovatore. This expansion of repertoire has also brought him emblematic Puccini characters such as Rodolfo in La Bohème and Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly, as well as French opera roles like the Chevalier des Grieux in Massenet’s Manon.
After a season in which he has sung La Bohème at the Ópera de A Coruña, Marina at Madrid’s Teatro de La Zarzuela, and Madama Butterfly at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, Celso Albelo returns to the Maggio Musicale with four performances of Rigoletto on February 16, 18, 20, and 23, in a production directed by David Livermore and conducted by maestro Stefano Ranzani. He will share the stage with soprano Olga Peretyatko as Gilda and baritone Daniel Luis de Vicente as Rigoletto, among others.
After this engagement in Italy, Albelo will return to Madrid’s Teatro de La Zarzuela to perform Sorozábal’s La tabernera del puerto.