A recital featuring emerging opera stars in San Francisco this week curated by Merola Opera Program faculty member Mario Antonio Marra reflects his mission to champion Neapolitan music.
“This music is important to me because I was born speaking the Neapolitan language and grew up around a lot of this music,” says the pianist and conductor originally from New Haven, Connecticut. “My father was a tenor, and so I grew up playing a lot of this music with him. We would have these concerts in big banquet halls, usually for charity, and there would be seven or eight singers, including my father, who would sing all of these Neapolitan songs with piano.”
“L’Anima Napoletana” (“The Neapolitan Soul”), for seven singers and five pianists participating in San Francisco’s acclaimed summer opera training program, includes folk-inspired melodies and 19th and 20th century romantic pieces expressing the passionate, honest and free essence of the music of Southern Italy.
The June 25 recital in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music — featuring sopranos Shannon Crowley and Charlotte Kelso, mezzo-soprano Stella FitzGerald, tenors Chester Seungyup Han, Cole McIlquham and Logan Wagner, bass Theo Harrah, and pianists Sakurako Jayne Abe, Eric Head, Deven Shah, Tony Stauffer and Yue Qi Zhang — ushers in Merola’s 2026 season.
Marra’s vision for the program is to tell three stories through 23 works, including Rossini’s “La Danza,” Tosti’s “Marechiare,” Pennino’s “Pecché?,” Gambardella’s “O marenariello,” Leoncavallo’s “Mattinata,” Bixio’s “Parlami d’amare Mariu” and Cioffi’s “Na sera ‘e maggio.”
“The first set of songs surrounds this young, vibrant couple — they’re happy, fresh and in love. … The second couple we’re focusing on is a much more typical Neapolitan couple — passionate, jealous, brash and then deeply in love — and so there’s a bit of struggle in their relationship and we get to hear that through the songs they sing to each other.”
The third love story is a love triangle: “We have a young woman who has her first love, and she believes that to be love until another man comes in and sweeps her away. … this third set of songs with these three singers is an exploration of love, loss and redemption,” Marra says.
A few of the program’s pieces will be sung in Italian rather than Neapolitan, most prominently Rossini’s composition, but Marra says it very much belongs: “It’s in Italian but it’s a tarantella, which is very important for Naples.”
Naples, central to the development of opera in the 17th and 18th centuries, boasted the Neapolitan school of music that helped shape Baroque, Classical and Romantic styles. But the popular style of Neapolitan music featured in this recital blossomed in the wake of the first Neapolitan song contest held in Piedigrotta, a seafront section of Naples, in 1839. Marra says the competition was important because it brought attention to Neapolitan song as its own genre.
“Te voglio bene assaje” (“I Love You So Much”), with music traditionally attributed to Donizetti and lyrics by Neapolitan poet Raffaele Sacco, winner of that historic contest, is on the program.
As Italian opera moved from the prominence of the bel canto style of the 19th century to verismo in the 20th century, so, too, did Neapolitan popular songs: “The biggest change is how romantic the gestures become in the 20th century, and the Neapolitan songs written during the 1910s and 1920s have that verismo quality,” says Marra, noting that the recital reflects this movement.
For the young Merola artists, learning a new language, putting voice to that tongue — and performing — will be a valuable test of their skills, Marra says: “The amount of heart you have to have and how naked you have to be in front of the audience to pull off this music is a really wonderful muscle that’s trained. We want everybody who gets up in front of the audience to give as much of what they have inside — this music goes right to the bone.”
Merola Opera Program’s “L’Anima Napoletana” is at 7 p.m. June 25 at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, 50 Oak St., San Francisco. Tickets are $25-$75 at merola.org.
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