David Hash, director and musical producer, has dug deep with his hands into the roots of Opera, discovering that those roots were also his roots because Opera is pop at 360°.
David Hash, at that moment pop music producer, fell in love with Opera and like all true lovers showered his attention, time and money on the object of his love.
He tore up dusty operatic librettos to make place for a comic called Rigoletto Comix. It is impossible not to read it.
He has definitively put in the attic the austere and sad costumes of Opera singers, pumping the scene with the irreverent creations of [Vivienne Westwood][1880]. He has attracted thousands of young people to Opera, telling the “new” public about who are the men before the composers.

Certainly, he had to plug his ears against caustic comments of the melomaniac snobs. He felt somewhat alone and still a little mad when, with maybe a misunderstood enthusiasm, he illustrated to music distributors “his” Giuseppe Verdi from a pop star point of view. But he held out and in the end he did it: the [Columbia Tristar] story&x=0&y=0&output=xml_no_dtd&filter=p&getfields=*&client=sp-us&proxystylesheet=sp-us&site=sp-ussigned a bomb of an exclusive contract with him for the distribution throughout 100 countries in the world of the “[Rigoletto Stor][1881] DVD, dealing with the suggestive live performance in the Piazza del Campo of Siena. In that square were 32,000 people. In only two months from the launch, more than 150,000 people bought the DVD, overturning the average of 1,000 copies sold for the usual Opera DVD. It was a success not by chance, but constructed, believing in it, in perfect solitude: whilst the whole filmed Opera world continued along a one-way street, with its static shots that inexplicably depute emotion only to the soundtrack, David Hash, brought up on bread, comics and Sergio Leone allowed the spectators to climb onto the stage, inside the story.
Close ups, syncopated cuts, slow motion, eyes, lips and nerves taught, sound fading! This, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a story treated like a film noir; forget the rest.

What is the new challenge of Hash in 2008, after having transformed the buffoon Rigoletto into a comic (attached to the DVD) read by thousands of youngsters? It will be the realisation of new, “turnkey” stage designs for lyric Operas for the great opera houses, utilising the latest 3D and Blue Screen digital technologies. His test bed will be the representation of a colossal Nabucco in Jerusalem.
The spectator will be immersed for more than two hours in a spectacular, fantastic world, taken into enormous, interactive virtual scenographies in High Definition with the immediate ability to change atmosphere, meteorological weather and animations. Special effects that knit together perfectly around stage and musical score requirements, utilising the same technologies on the live theatrical set utilised for the biggest Hollywood films.

Together with the artist, the public will live exciting acrobatic duels on the stage, amongst the most spectacular ever seen live. It will assist at the improvised animation of fantastic, 3D hyper-realistic creatures (such as King Kong of Peter Jackson); it will see fires which light and phantasms which grow from the earth, then floating even over the heads of the scene’s protagonists.

Whilst we talk, David Hash shows rough sketches, storyboards, scenographies and production plans, and the force of the ideas that he transmits is passionately evocative of the next spectacular that we are waiting to see. Whilst he gesticulates, his hands move like a scenic machine that seems to materialise his dreams from thin air.
David Hash defines himself as a true misanthropist and does not love being interviewed and appearing in public. Because of this, I let him freewheel and take notes about the sensations that he transmits to me.

“When they ask me what do I do for a living, I cannot pigeonhole myself in a precise definition of a director, or a producer and anyway, what is a producer doing in the world of Opera?
I dedicate myself to my work in a maniacal way, even though I do not invent anything, but re-invent that which already exists under another point of view. I feel like I am David against Goliath: the weapons I have at my disposal are not big budgets, but great ideas.

The most conventional and proved weapon of Opera, like the cinema, is money. I, like David, have a very small weapon, but only in appearance. It is the force of the ideas, those which you must really believe in until death or you are damned. They are the ideas that go against the pre-established rules that make finding allies very difficult. I don’t like it when operatic librettos and original musical scores are distorted. I venerate the original works of the great masters. If anything, I distort the communication because I look inside the hearts of the passed great masters: Verdi is pop, he talks to the people with a certain simplicity; for example, when he talks about prostitutes, never forgets that that they have great hearts squeezed into a corset too tight to contain it”.

So what now? What stones has David loaded into his catapult to recommence the assault on the giant Goliath?
“I have collected the stones that Beethoven left me along the roadside; he isn’t pop, he is the father of Glam Rock!

If only they knew in what conditions he was in when composing his immortal music, I believe that the youngsters today would hang posters of Beethoven on their bedroom walls. This time it will be “I love Beethoven” and soon, even the youngest kids will love him madly”.

[David Hash][1882] (Guido David Asher Pietroni) has participated as a producer in Italy to the realization of graet musical like Cats, The Rocky Horror Show and The Chronicler of Broadway. This last musical tells the story of the Italian, Jewish and American Mafia during Jazz Age. The worldwide tour is planned for 2010.
David Hash since 2004 is a member of [Recording Academy][1883] and, with Rigoletto Story, was candidated for two nominations ("Best Sourround Sound" and "Best Musical Long Video") at 46th Grammy Award."
From 2005, he is member of the "Tribeca Film Center", the prestigious production centre made available to young entertainment talent by Robert De Niro.