Rough and Shining Jewels Music & Vision 14 agosto

Rough and Shining Jewels
GIUSEPPE PENNISI visits the
2010 Rossini Opera Festival

On the Adriatic shore, Pesaro is a lively and hospitable city all year round. Its population grows from 90,000 to nearly 150,000 during the summer because it is a well-known, reasonably-priced seaside resort. It also has an immaculate old city center and a territory with splendid views and unforgettable landscapes. Its population is industrious: since World War II, Pesaro changed from a lower-than-middle income town to a high income area due to manufacturing, especially in furniture and apparels. It also has the most important, and most exclusive, high fashion boutique in Central Italy -- in the past visited by high class and high spending power ladies from Milan and Rome (coming by special limousine), but now also has steady and loyal clients from Japan and Russia (who land at the nearby Rimini International Airport).

Pesaro was Gioacchino Rossini's birthplace, and for the last thirty-one years has been the city of the Rossini Opera Festival (ROF). In his last will and testament, Rossini devolved his wealth to the city to develop a conservatory -- now one of the best in Italy. ROF has made Pesaro a major international music town for a few weeks every year. ROF is a monographic festival like the Wagnerian Festival in Bayreuth. It operates along with, but distinct from, the Rossini Foundation, whose mission is to prepare critical editions of all Rossini's works. It runs a school -- l'Accademia Rossiniana -- to rediscover and preserve Rossini's special vocal style. Seats for the Festival performances are difficult to get; normally reservations have to be made in about January and not all requests are accepted. Agencies charge a hefty mark up. Seventy percent of the audience is non-Italian; only ten percent is from the Marche, the regional area containing Pesaro. There is always a large contingent of foreign press: a recent book documents that four hundred non-Italian papers, weekly and monthly, have dealt with the Festival over the last few years.

The ROF has performed its mission to discover Rossini's 'serious' operas and other forgotten masterpieces very well. Normally, during a Festival, three operas are staged: two are rediscovery and one belongs to what is now accepted as repertory in major opera houses. There is also a variety of concerts to select from. There is a lovely eight hundred seat nineteen century theatre and a modern twelve hundred seat Adriatic Arena (a sport stadium converted into an opera house for the ROF weeks (this year 9-21 August).

The 2010 Festival is dedicated to Rossini's youth: operas composed in his teens and early twenties. In this report, I follow the order not of the presentation of the three operas in Pesaro this year, but the chronology of their first performances ever with a view of getting a better feel of Rossini's dramaturgical and musical developments.

Maria José Moreno and Yijie Shi in 'Demetrio e Polibio' at the Rossini Opera Festival. Photo © 2010 Studio Amati Bacciardi
Demetrio e Polibio was composed by Rossini at the age of sixteen for the Mombelli family, a four singer travelling company active at the time in central Italy. In 1812 it was on the stage of the important Teatro Valle in Rome. It was performed quite often all over Italy until 1825, when it disappeared. One of its many versions was revived years ago at the Festival di Valle d'Itria in Martina Franca. On 10 August 2010, the first 'revision on the original sources' was unveiled at the ROF. Even now, it hard to say which arias and duets belong to Rossini and which to the rest of Monbelli's team. It has, however, two important innovations: a) the role of the young man in love is written for a mezzo in trousers, rather than for a castrato as was still the practice, and that of the father for a baritenore (a tenor who would emphasize the central register and could reach grave tonalities). The production is simple, has low costs and is designed to be seen in other theatres. The stage director (Davide Livermore) presents the dramma serio in due atti on a semi-empty modern stage where members of the Mombelli company (or their ghosts) perform the opera; the audience sees it from backstage. The stage set and costumes are the work of Accademia delle Belle Arti di Urbino (thus a University Group). Corrado Rovaris conduct a local orchestra, organized for the purpose. The four singers are all young from the Accademia Rossiniana -- thus they command comparatively low fees. Yijie Shi and Mirco Palazzi (the baritenor and the bass) were excellent. Victoria Zaytseva is a good mezzo but with little volume. The soprano Maria José Moreno has a good potential to develop. The Prague Chamber Chorus was as effective as ever. In short, a rough but pleasant draft of what Rossini, then adolescent, had in store for the future.
Sigismondo was a fiasco when it was premièred on 26 December 1814 at La Fenice in Venice; there wasn't a second performance. The libretto is a pretty horrible plot of loyalty, betrayal and love in eighteenth century Poland. It is based on a long standing legend which inspired, inter alia, Robert Schumann for Génevieve or Genoveva, his only opera. Attempts to revive Sigismondo were made by Richard Bonynge in Treviso and Rovigo (with a young cast) in 1992, but with very little success (even though there is a decent CD to record those performances). In the previous eighteen months, Rossini had composed five operas, including four absolute masterpieces like Il Signor Bruschino, l'Italiana in Algeri, Tancredi and Il Turco in Italia. He was an attractive twenty-two-year-old in a happy-go-lucky Venice and had quite a variety of girlfriends. Most likely, he was exhausted by both composing and the maze of his romantic life. However, the opera is interesting for musicologists because, with quite a bit of humor, the complicated plot was treated by the composer with a rather light hand by borrowing from previous operas (such as Tancredi) and providing first rough drafts of future masterpieces such as Il Barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola. It a rough jewel, a precursor of future elegant and precious necklaces and rings.

Daniela Barcellona and Olga Peretyatko in 'Sigismondo' at the Rossini Opera Festival. Photo © 2010 Studio Amati Bacciardi
On 9 August, at the opening performance of the 2010 ROF, Michele Mariotti, the conductor, the orchestra and chorus of the Teatro dell'Opera di Bologna and the singers (Daniela Barcellona, Olga Peretyatko, Antonino Siragusa in the main roles, with Andrea Concetti, Manuela Bisceglie and Enea Scala in supporting parts), did marvels to capture Rossini's ambiguity (and humor) towards the crazy and disconnected libretto. They were not helped at all by the stage direction (Damiano Michieletto), the costumes (Carla Teti) or the lighting. Michieletto is a young up-and-coming and highly 'politically correct' stage director in the Italian opera firmament. This staging cannot be qualified with an adjective acceptable to M&V readers. It is totally unrelated to either the music or common sense. The plot was transferred from a fairytale Poland to an early twentieth century mad house; a very old trick -- seen in the 1990s for several productions of Lucia, Traviata, I Puritani and Pikovaya dama. Now it is dusty and smells old. In addition, in spite of the supertitles, it was impossible to follow what was going on stage in this B-rated Ibsen (not Rossini) context, appropriate to a high school performance in Sweden and million of miles distant from Rossini's cunning talent. Michieletto may consider taking a rest from his swirly stage direction engagements, in short a sabbatical to read a few good books and, in the event, have a good talk to his analyst. He would have appreciated that the boos in the audience were accolades for Rossini (in spite of his own doing). Whilst the madhouse was showing its senseless aimlessness, from the pit and on the stage, a rough but delicate Rossini was laughing at us with a lot of irony thanks to Mariotti's superb conducting, Barcellona and Peretyatko's lush vocalizing and Siragusa's High Cs (at times, excessively shouted). Let us hope that ROF will produce a CD but set aside any plan for a DVD (maybe until Michieletto's return from his badly-deserved sabbatical).

Alex Esposito, Lawrence Brownlee, Marianna Pizzolato, Paolo Bordogna and Nicola Alaimo in 'La Cenerentola' at the Rossini Opera Festival. Photo © 2010 Studio Amati Bacciardi
La Cenerentola is the third offering. Your reviewer was admitted to the 8 August dress rehearsal in the huge Adriatica Arena. It is a dramma giocoso, one of the very few Rossini operas always performed even during romanticism and verismo, when most of his productions disappeared from most theatres (even in Italy). The plot is well known; it is a modification of Perrault's fairytale because in 1817 in the Pope's State, it was forbidden to stage supernatural events. The libretto by Jacopo Ferretti is a well-balanced comedy about growing to adulthood (for the Prince and Angelina, the Cinderella of the plot) with plenty of comic relief (the two half-sisters, their father, the Pince's valet Dandini). However, it would have been a dramma giocoso as many of that period without Rossini's charming and scintillating score -- a true polished, shining and elegant jewel. Yves Abel unveiled the bounty of beauties from the swift and tender overture. Lawrence Brownlee (the Prince) and Marianna Pizzolato (Angelina) were just charming in the lovely first Act duet. The comic baritone and bass group (Nicola Alaimo, Paolo Bordogna, Alex Esposito) are as hilarious as they should be. Less brilliant were the two half sisters (Manon Strauss Evrard and Cristina Faus). The sextet of stupefaction in the second Act after the Prince and Dandini have taken shelter in Don Magnifico's run down house, was great. Angelina's final rondo was of high quality.
Copyright © 14 August 2010 Giuseppe Pennisi,
Rome, Italy

In 2011, the Rossini Opera Festival features Adelaide di Borgogna, Mosé in Egitto and La Scala di Seta, and the world première of the critical edition of Il Barbiere di Siviglia. Anyone interested should book early at www.rossinioperafestival.it
GIOACCHINO ROSSINI
ITALY
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