When conductor Carlo Rizzi stepped forward at the end of La Traviata to address a delighted audience in his Italian-accented Welsh, he was marking a piece of history. Welsh National Opera had, after 60 years of peripatetic homelessness, for the first time performed on a stage it could call its own.
Welsh opera has a home at last
Charlotte Higgins [The Guardian, 21 Feb 05]
When conductor Carlo Rizzi stepped forward at the end of La Traviata to address a delighted audience in his Italian-accented Welsh, he was marking a piece of history. Welsh National Opera had, after 60 years of peripatetic homelessness, for the first time performed on a stage it could call its own.
It was not, admittedly, the Zaha Hadid-designed Cardiff Bay Opera House that had been on the table in 1992 when Rizzi had arrived as WNO's music director: but the #106m Wales Millennium Centre, a great, gleaming hulk of building in self-consciously Welsh stone, slate and wood, which opened its doors in November.