As I observed almost a year ago when the current season of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) was first announced, a major event in the season will be the Beethoven Project. This will be a series of three concerts to be given in May over the course of which Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas will pursue both retrospective and prospective views of the work of Ludwig van Beethoven with an emphasis on rarely-heard compositions. One of the soloists for this series will be the 28-year-old tenor Michael Fabiano, who will be making his SFS debut. He will perform at two of the concerts in the series; and his “official” debut will be in the first SFS performance of Beethoven’s Opus 98 song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte. He will then return to the Davies stage to perform as the tenor soloist in the final concert, which will feature Beethoven’s Opus 123 mass setting (Missa Solemnis) in D major.
Fabiano is a winner of the National Council Auditions run by the Metropolitan Opera, which he entered in 2007. This past October he made his house role debut at the Met singing Cassio in Elijah Moshinsky’s staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello. That was one of the productions selected for broadcast under The Met: Live in HD, a broadcast seen in more than 1900 movie theaters and performing arts centers in 64 countries around the world this past October 27. Next week the recording of that broadcast will be aired twice on KQED Live, first at 8 p.m. on Monday, February 25, followed shortly by a 2 a.m. broadcast on Tuesday, February 26. This will provide those planning to attend the Beethoven Project concerts a excellent foretaste of Fabiano’s vocal talents.
Fabiano also made his San Francisco Opera debut in October of 2011 in the role of Gennaro in Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia.
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