Ferruccio Furlanetto as King Philip II in Don Carlo at the San Francisco Opera, 2016. Photos Cristin O'Keeffe

Don Carlo at the San Francisco Opera

Furlanetto throws new light on the final Verdi performance of SFO Summer 2016, as press stated. Due to the other appointments Ferruccio Furlanetto gave only one performance during Don Carlo run in San Francisco on June 29 but with great success and stellar reviews.

In the Press

The male voices were superb, in particular those of Furlanetto … Furlanetto brought depth to the role, both with his bottomless voice, but also his characterization of a King struggling between his emotions as a father, husband, king and Catholic, in a tremendous Act IV aria. His duet with the Grand Inquisitor (the smokey Andrea Silvestrelli, a regular on this stage) and his quartet with Eboli, Rodrigo and Elisabetta were works of beauty.

“Furlanetto throws new light on the final Verdi performance of SFO Summer 2016... He knew how to portray a man who could arouse fear in others as the only means of shielding his own fears from public view ”

“René Pape has gotten accolades for his portrayal of King Philip this June, but it was Furlanetto, as his successor just for this closing night, who drew the second greatest set of cheers from the audience (falling just short of Martínez’s Tu che) for his troubled Ella gamma m’amò, where Shakespearean introverted qualities felt like the metonymic explanation of the opera’s most important theme: the struggle between the confusing, emotional private and the pompous political and religious “blindness” of the public. “

...Furlanetto sings just as magnificently as he did thirty years earlier. Indeed, he is generally acclaimed as the greatest Philip II of the current generation.

In San Francisco Furlanetto lived up to his reputation, singing a powerful Philip II and endowing this character with finely nuanced complexity.