Sergio Foresti

Sergio Foresti (1968) is a virtuoso Italian baritone. He first graduated in both opera singing and piano at the conservatory of Modena (Italy) and a decade later also in vocal chamber music in Florence (Italy). From the start of his career, he explored several musical styles in depth. In polyphonic music, for about 15 years he took the bass part in many concerts and recordings of renaissance madrigals with Concerto Italiano. He even worked with the Italian medieval group LaReverdie.
As a soloist he performed sacred music from the early nineties on. His debut in opera in 1998 was as Alcandro in Vivaldi’s L’Olimpiade. Since then he worked with important conductors like René Jacobs, Rinaldo Alessandrini, Fabio Biondi, and Jordi Savall. He performed on many stages all over Europe.
In 2012 Sergio Foresti moved from Rome to Berlin. He decided to study all over again the belcanto style of singing, which came to life with the invention of opera around 1600. He focused on technical qualities, such as the even placement of the voice, legato singing, flexibility of the voice, and ornamentations like trills. He looked for technical and stylistic insights in the old treatises. He realized that the early recordings of great singers of the past are a treasure trove of examples of how the belcanto principles can be put into practice. He came to the conclusion that music above all is created to move the soul, and that this is the approach he wants to follow.
From this deepened understanding of belcanto, he restudied his operatic and chamber music repertoire. Always working from the music score, he looks for meaningful ways to express the harmony between text and music. While maintaining a strong link to baroque music, he performed in operas of Mozart, Rossini, and Donizetti. In 2018 he released a collection of Italian cantatas of Antonio Caldara with Ensemble Stile Galante. This collection of arias for Giuseppe Maria Boschi is the realisation of and old dream, in collaboration with the fantastic Abchordis Ensemble under Andrea Buccarella.