The  NAPOLI MANDOLINORCHESTRA is back with its second project for our label after Serenata luntana (Felmay 8055) and more than ten years of tours who have enthused the most  demanding and careful listeners. 

The Orchestra, which was born among the members of the Neapolitan Mandolin Academy, thanks to the work of Mauro Squillante (mandolin) and Leonardo Massa (cello and mandoloncello), after having revived the best and rootsier Neapolitan music, for this occasion has decided to tackle a quite original programme. Resulting from a deep musicological research on a huge number of opera trascriptions and variations,  Mandolini all’Opera presents soma fundamental melodrama pages. It is a refined reworking whose roots lie in the tradition of the Italian plectrum clubs, which, between XIX and XX century, popularized the opera outside the theatres.

The first piece is a fantasia from Bellini's Norma, created by the Florentine mandolinist Enrico Marucelli, who lived in the second half of the XIX century. He elaborated also many themes from Verdi's Traviata, reworked here with great ingenuity by the  NAPOLI MANDOLINORCHESTRA. Donizetti is present with Don Pasquale, exemplified by a fantasia written by Ferdinando Francia, and with a fragment of Lucia di Lammermoor, created by Gioviale. 

Then Bellini again, with I Puritani, presented here in a transcription of the Roman mandolinist Maciocchi. There is no need of introductions for Bizet's Carmen, reworked here by the Orchestra with its most famous arias, thanks to the ingenuity of Vincenzo Biffi.

If on paper the union between a mandolin orchestra and the melodrama tradition seemed unlikely and hazardous, after you press “play” on your cd player, it will only take a few seconds to be enveloped in an enchanting, old time atmosphere.