Semi-serious Rossini

GIUSEPPE PENNISI visits
the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro

The Rossini Opera Festival (ROF, 10-22 August 2015) has reached its thirty sixth edition, a target very few expected to be achieved when the series started with a makeshift organization. Now the ROF has three theatres and halls for operas and concerts, an academy to train singers in Rossini's very special musical theatre, a loyal audience from all over the world and an annual Italian government grant as one of four opera festivals of international concern. This edition was preceded by some changes in the management team and, due to the area's economic crisis of industry and banking, a decrease in support from local private partners. Thus, the original program was drastically changed. The cornerstones are the three operas that, in four cycles, can be seen in sequence by an audience coming to Pesaro, the Adriatic town where Rossini was born in 1792. Instead of the customary two new productions and a revival, two revivals and a new production were offered — all of the same kind: semi-serious operas. In addition, every edition features a large series of concerts, including belcanto concerts, and Il Viaggio a Reims in a historical production for the Academy singers. The plan for next year is to go back to two new productions (La Donna del Lago and Il Turco in Italia) and a revival (Ciro in Babilonia), plus the usual mix of tragic and comic operas.
The semi-serious opera is a genre which had a certain success in Italy and France in the years after the French revolution and around 1840, when it was overtaken by melodrama in Italy and opera lyrique. Like in opera à sauvetage, after a rather dramatic plot, intertwined with moments of comic relief, there is a happy ending when the villains are punished and the good people rewarded. I saw the first cycle (10-12 August) in this order: La Gazza Ladra, La Gazzetta and L'Inganno Felice.

Carlo Lepore as Tarabotto and Vassilis Kavayas as Bertrando in 'L'Inganno Felice' at the 2015 Rossini Opera Festival. Click on the image for higher resolution

On 12 August 2015, L'Inganno Felice was presented as the last opera of the cycle. It is a revival of the 1994 production by Graham Vick and Richard Hudson, then quite young, and it the festival's best offering. After one act of ninety minutes, there were fifteen minutes of accolades. L'Inganno Felice had been a major hit from 1812 to 1868: there are records of nearly 240 productions not only in Europe but also in New York, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago and Vera Cruz. Then it disappeared until 1994. A simple plot, eight musical numbers (some 'borrowed' from previous Rossini operas and some anticipating the composer's future works), an engrossing set in an iron mine on the coast, a team of young singers (Mariangela Sicilia, Vassilis Kavayas, Carlo Lepore, Davide Luciano and Giulio Mastrototaro), with only Carlo Lepore as a Rossini veteran, and in the pit the twenty-four-year-old Denis Vlasenko conducting a group of young instrumentalists from the Academia were a recipe for tremendous success.

Mariangela Sicilia as Isabella in 'L'Inganno Felice' at the 2015 Rossini Opera Festival. Click on the image for higher resolution

The new production (La Gazzetta on 11 August — Enrique Mazzola, conductor, Manuele Gasperoni, stage designer, Maria Filippi, costume designer, and Marco Carniti, stage director) is nearly an opera buffa even though based on a bourgeois play by Carlo Goldoni. The stage direction and the conducting — the orchestra of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna was in the pit — emphasized the comic aspects and the fast rhythm. In the comparatively large team of singers, Nicola Alaimo, Hasmik Torosyan and Maxim Mironov were especially good.

Raffaella Lupinacci as Doralice, Maxim Mironov as Alberto, Nicola Alaimo as Don Pomponio, Vito Priante as Filippo and Hasmik Torosyan as Lisetta in 'La Gazzetta' at the 2015 Rossini Opera Festival. Click on the image for higher resolution

On 10 August, the ROF was inaugurated with a revival of the 2007 production of La Gazza Ladra, a nearly four hour semi-serious opera. The conductor, Donato Renzetti, gave a slow solemn pace. Nino Machaidze, the protagonist, had some difficulties in the cavatina but coped quite well with an impervious role. The other singers (René Barbera, Simone Alberghini, Teresa Iervolino, Alex Esposito and Marko Mimica) were of a good level, and so were the orchestra and chorus of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna.

A scene from 'La Gazza Ladra' at the 2015 Rossini Opera Festival. Click on the image for higher resolution

In my view, the very weak part of the production was the direction of Damiano Michieletto, the sets by Paolo Fantin and the costumes of Carla Teti. The team transformed a semi serious opera in a truculent, bloody grand-guignol piece mostly dissociated from the music. Michieletto is now an international star; thus the audience applauded the staging nevertheless.