Caramoor has announced its 2017 summer festival program.

The festival, which comprises seven summer weeks of opera, orchestral, chamber, jazz, world and American roots music, family programs, young artist showcases, and sound artwork, will celebrate its 20th anniversary of Bel Canto at Caramoor with five summer operatic offerings

The program will include two offering with 2017’s Artist in-Residence Angela Meade. Meade will headline Caramoor’s opening-night opera gala with tenor Santiago Ballerini. The program includes favorites from Italian arias, duets, and ensembles and will be capped by the iconic overture and finale from Rossini’s “William Tell.”

On July 8, Meade will make her role debut in Bellini’s “Il Pirata,” after acclaimed performances in Rossini’s “Semiramide,” Donizetti’s “Lucrezia Borgia” and Bellini’s “Norma” at the festival. The soprano will sing alongside Ballerini and the Orchestra of St. Luke.

Caramoor’s Director of Opera Will Crutchfield noted, “In 2000, ‘Il Pirata’ was the first Bellini title revived by Bel Canto at Caramoor, and everyone was bowled over by the depth and beauty of the work. … Bellini was helping to usher in a new kind of opera. The pain of love that cannot be crowned with union; the longings of an outcast for status and community; the hunger for affection by the un-loved – these are the themes of ‘Il Pirata,’ and they would be the themes of opera’s Romantic century, the era that produced the art-form’s most durable masterpieces.”

The other three operatic concerts that will be presented include Bel Canto Young Artists.  The artists will participate in the American premiere of Manuel Garcia’s chamber opera “Un avvertimento ai gelosi” (“Advice to the Jealous”); “The Intimate Bellini,” a program of miniatures for soloists and ensemble; and Rossini’s “Petite messe solennelle,” an extended missa solemnis – with the original instrumentation of two pianos and harmonium – that the composer considered “the last of [his] sins of old age.” The young artists will also participate in Bellini’s “Il Pirata.”