2011 Rossini Opera Festival
A Turning Point Part One Adelaide di Borgogna

For Rossini lovers, ROF’s commitment to stage Rossini’s operas using the most recent critical editions has been the unmistakable selling point for their yearly pilgrimage to Pesaro, Italy, regardless of August’s oppressive heat. Since 1999, the first year I attended the festival, I have watched audiences react with enthusiastic joy to the splendid musical renderings of Tancredi, Ermione, La Gazza Ladra and Matilde di Shabran, to name just a few of the festival’s outstanding artistic achievements. Performances of these works were defined by thrilling vocal virtuosity of exemplary singers buoyed by dedicated conductors. And stage directors, understanding Rossini’s dramatic intentions, presented the works worthy of their critical praise.

Not so in 2011.

For this season’s productions of Adelaide di Borgogna and Mosè in Egitto, stage directors Pier’Alli and Graham Vick, who are well-known in the opera world for their staging of operatic classics, were making their directorial debuts at the festival. Pier’Alli’s Adelaide and Vick’s Mosè productions showed how their artistic visions went beyond what appeared on the stage; their influence resulted in arias cut from the critical editions of both operas, no doubt with the approval of Artistic Director Alberto Zedda.

The Italian press had mentioned that in 2011, ROF was using the new critical edition of Adelaide prepared by Gabriele Gravagna and Alberto Zedda for the opera’s first staged presentation at the festival. But the edition had already been used successfully in ROF’s 2006 concert version which was a big hit with audiences. This time, however, Berenegario’s great aria “Alle voci della gloria,” which premiered in 2006, was replaced with, “Se protegge amica sorte,” an aria which Gravagna and Zedda described as “modest” in their opera program notes in 2006. Also, Gravagna and Zedda ignored their previous tribute to Patric Schmid, the original artistic director of Opera Rara for using the “Alle voci” aria when he presented Adelaide in London over thirty years ago. And, as they noted in their ’06 program, manuscript sources revealed “Se protegge” was not the work of Rossini, and, soon after the premiere, the composer replaced it with, “‘Alle voci della gloria,’ which the Maestro had written in the golden years of Tancredi and L’Italiana in Algeri…”
(more…)

2011 Rossini Opera
Festival A Turning Point Part Two Mosè in Egitto

Since the Rossini Opera Festival began in 1983, no opera production has garnered as much controversy both on and off the stage as Graham Vick’s Mosè in Egitto, Rossini’s biblical drama. From the myriad reviews in the Italian and foreign press to the vociferous audience reactions to Vick’s staging the opera in today’s Middle East, one may ask, were the theatrical consequences worth all the uproar? There were so many ingredients mixed into this operatic salad bowl, it’s a toss up as to what was sweet or sour in the production.

Vick’s theatrical vision for Mosè turned out to be the polar opposite of what Rossini and librettist Andrea Tottola’s originally intended. Written for the 1818 Lenten season, the work was called an Azione tragico-sacra, in which all the ensembles were geared to reflect the biblical references of Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt and into the promised land. The composer and librettist also recognized they would need to add a little romance to the work if they were to attract an audience. This part of the plot involved the Pharaoh’s son Osiride and his secret marriage to Elcia, a Hebrew and a devoted follower of Moses.

Vick decided he wanted to mount the opera in a way that would be meaningful to today’s audiences, but he filled the production with so many references to the current state of affairs in many parts of the Middle East, there was hardly any room left for the Egyptians. He bunched together enough political ideas to divide audience reaction from acclaim to boos and uneasy rumblings.

Starting with Zelmira in 2009, ROF moved all their performances from a smaller tiered theater to a bigger auditorium that holds up to 1200 people at the Adriatic Arena. But the move has had an adverse effect on the singing, since the space has very little resonance. So this year, ROF opened up a temporary roof all the way to the top rafters hoping that the sound would ring out. It succeeded, but the intimate performances that the festival has always specialized in are a thing of the past. A bigger space, however, means higher attendance and more revenue for the financially-strapped festival.

There was no doubt that Stewart Nunn’s sets and costumes reflected Vick’s depiction of terrorism in today’s world. The set had three levels. The bottom one was for the Hebrew choruses to inhabit as they sang the beautiful vocal ensembles that Rossini and Tottola created for them. It was the middle level which ran the full width of the stage where most of the opera’s action took place which showed off the singers’ voices. And the upper level was designed to give the set the height it needed to represent the full range of the ruler’s living quarters. The set mirrored one of Saddam Hussein’s many bombed-out palaces that were pictured in the news at the beginning of the Iraq War.

But Nunn’s costumes were the focal point of all the brouhaha.
(more…)

Mosè in Egitto-A Fresh Look

Gioachino ROSSINI (1792-1868) Mosè in Egitto – azione tragico-sacra in three acts (1819 version) Mose – Lorenzo Regazzo (bass) Elcia – Akie Amou (soprano) Faraone – Wojtek Gierlach (bass) Osiride – Filippo Adami (tenor) Amaltea – Rossella Bevacqua (soprano) Aronne – Giorgio Trucco (tenor) Amenofi Karen Bandelow (mezzo-soprano) Mambre – Giuseppe Fedeli (tenor)

Württemberg Philharmonic Orchestra Conductor: Antonio Fogliani San Pietro a Majella Chorus, Naples ( Elsa Evangelista, Chorus-master) Wildbad Wind Band (Martin Koch, Band-leader)

Recorded live on 1st,7th and 12th July, 2006, in the Kursaal, Bad Wildbad, Germany during the ROSSINI IN WILDBAD festival (Artistic director: Jochen Schönleber) A co-production with SWR Producer: Siegbert Ernst Editor: Dr Anette Sidhu – Ingenhoff Engineers:Wolfgang Rein and Siggi Mehne Booklet Notes Reto Müller and Keith Anderson

Cover: Stage design by Auguste Caron for the second act of the French version of Moïse et Pharaon (4 acts) by Rossini, Paris ,1827

CD 1 75:44 Act 1 57:21 Act 2 18:23 CD 2 60:54 Act ll (contd.) 47:01 Act lll 13:53

When Gioachino Rossini sat down to compose Mosè in Egitto in 1818, he was in the midst of his most prolific musical period as an opera composer. On the one side of his musical journey, Rossini had already mounted the dramme giocosi, L’Italiana in Algeri and La Cenerentola, the dramma, Elizabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, his first Neapolitan work and his most popular comedy, Il Barbiere di Siviglia. And as for the years after 1818, the opera world would soon get to hear such rich musical works as the azione tragica, Ermione, the melodramma, La Donna del lago and what Phillip Gossett calls in his book, Divas and Scholars, Rossini’s most innovative Italian serious opera, Maometto ll, the last three composed for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples under the watchful eye of the impresario, Domenico Barbaja.

(more…)