Opera heard from only a few feet away carries a particular enchantment. In a great house, sound travels through height and spectacle; a small theater reveals the pulse beneath the polish. One catches the intake of breath, the shaping of a vowel, the instant when technique disappears into feeling. Magnitude becomes intimate, almost confidential.
That closeness gave The Next Act, the Teatro alla Scala Association of America’s Annual Benefit Performance Gala, its emotional force. Held October 7 at The New York Historical, the program featured soprano Federica Lombardi and mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey. Two artists ordinarily entrusted to cavernous halls stood directly before us, allowing formidable artistry to arrive at conversational distance.
The occasion was unmistakably Italian in the most sophisticated sense. Beauty was treated not as garnish, but as a public value worthy of labor, money and protection. This is a society that takes splendor seriously—preserving opera houses, paintings, architecture, tailoring and culinary rites as proof that civilization should possess style as well as substance. The dress code, “Milanese Chic,” rendered ordinary New York black tie faintly administrative. Supported by the Consulate General of Italy in New York together with names including Armani, Brioni, Pomellato, Bellavista and Campari, the gathering understood elegance as cultural stewardship.
The great discovery centered on Arturo Toscanini. I knew the maestro’s name, certainly; I had not grasped the extent to which he reshaped this city’s expectations of musical excellence.
His ascent already bordered on legend. At 19, while touring Brazil as a cellist, Toscanini was summoned to conduct Verdi’s Aida and completed the task from memory. In 1896, he led the world premiere of Puccini’s La bohème at Turin’s Teatro Regio, introducing a work that would outlive chilly early reviews to become one of the repertory’s most cherished achievements.
La Scala refined his authority, though Manhattan proved far more than a foreign interlude. He debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 1908, working with Gustav Mahler. Two years later, Toscanini conducted the world premiere of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West at the Met, with Enrico Caruso and Emmy Destinn heading the cast. The city was not merely hosting him; under his baton, it was learning how rigor, passion and theatrical grandeur could coexist.
His reach expanded through the New York Philharmonic, which he led from the late 1920s until 1936. NBC then assembled an ensemble expressly for him. Broadcasts from Rockefeller Center’s Studio 8H carried symphonic music into homes across the country, turning radio into a national concert hall. Toscanini died at his Riverdale residence in 1957, leaving the metropolis not as another engagement, but as his final home.
Moral conviction fortified that perfectionism. An avowed opponent of Mussolini, Toscanini was assaulted in Bologna after refusing to conduct the regime’s anthem. He subsequently inaugurated the Palestine Orchestra and went back to bomb-damaged Milan after World War II to reopen La Scala. Fidelity to a score, in his hands, occupied the same ethical plane as resistance to tyranny.
Interviews led by The New York Times journalist Joshua Barone and NBC correspondent Chloe Melas illuminated that transatlantic life, while Lombardi and Hankey translated the discussion into living consequence: gifted performers carrying an inheritance forward through their own bodies.
Dinner followed upstairs among art and New York history—a perfect setting. La Scala’s operatic tradition was being toasted inside an institution devoted to the metropolis’s archive; the surroundings turned an intellectual premise into something visible, gracious and real.
Fortunato Ortombina, CEO and artistic director of Teatro alla Scala, joined TASAA president Milena Adamian in looking toward the generation still waiting in the wings. Founded in 2023, the American organization advances education, access and professional opportunity rather than permitting admiration to settle into nostalgia.
Its Arturo Toscanini Scholarship supports an Accademia Teatro alla Scala student, who will perform at the 2027 gala. Another initiative placed 126 students and graduates in a full staging of L’elisir d’amore, accompanied by an abbreviated adaptation that introduced more than 20,000 children—many from underserved communities—to the form. Preservation acquires meaning when the doors remain open.
Within that jewel-box auditorium, lineage entered the present tense. Song rose, biography slipped into immediacy and Italy’s devotion to magnificence disclosed its deeper purpose. Such refinement was never an escape from reality. It was a discipline, an offering and a promise that what humanity creates at its highest level will not be left without heirs.
For more information about the Teatro alla Scala Association of America and its programs, visit lascalaus.org.
