Born in Florence 35 years ago, Valentina Peleggi is to make her conducting debut at the English National Opera, one of the two most prestigious opera companies in London, with two performances of ‘La Boheme‘ on February 20th and 22nd. At the London Coliseum near Covent Garden, one of the largest theaters in the British capital, she will step on the podium and her baton will lead an orchestra of 60 elements and the singers on stage. In a recent interview, she said: “In the collective imagination, a conductor is an elderly man with white hair, and a woman who gets on the podium must find a way to have a strong leadership.”
With her decisive and harmonious gestures, Peleggi is one of the few women conductors and her international career is quite an impressive one. She studied in Rome at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, in Siena at Accademia Musicale Chigiana, and now she is now an emerging name in the London opera scene. Not only Poleggi is the first Italian to enter the orchestral conducting program at the Royal Academy of Music, but she also won numerous awards, worked at the Symphony Orchestra of the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil, next to the musical director Marin Alsop, before directing the Theatro São Pedro for the Italian repertoire. This season, on top of directing ‘La Boheme’ at the English National Opera, she will be working with some of the leading orchestras in Europe, including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales only in the United Kingdom. But she will also be performing in Italy with the Orchestra della Toscana and the Orchestra di Torino.
Ilona Catani Scarlett