Photo: ©Todd Rosenberg 2026
Last week, Francesco Meli and Lidia Fridman were on hand in the Windy City to help Music Director Emeritus Riccardo Muti celebrate his 600th performance, an evening of Italian opera, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Meli, a more entrenched name who now makes his career almost exclusively in Italy, has been a Muti favorite for a while. (He was Radamès in the 2019 CSO Aïda, amongst other U.S. performances.) Fridman, however, at just 30 years old is a newer and potentially more exciting quantity. “Her delivery suffers from a certain hollowness of sound typical of many female voices from Eastern Europe,” Parterre Box critic Marco Beghelli said of her recent performances in Stiffelio, “but her ability to move the audience with it, both in pianissimo passages and in heroic flourishes, is undeniable.”
Muti has been known to champion certain singers in his operatic work with the CSO; other singers to benefit from his steady support are Krassimira Stoyanova, Luca Salsi, Daniela Barcellona, and, of course, Anita Rachvelishvili.
Today’s excerpt sees Meli and Fridman joined by Marko Mimica in the trio from I lombardi conducted by Daniel Oren in Madrid last summer.
Verdi: I lombardi, “Qui posa il fianco!… Qual voluttà trascorrere” (Madrid 2025)
Lidia Fridman
Francesco Meli
Marko Mimica
Conductor: Daniel Oren
Teatro Real
Madrid
9 July 2025
In-house
