Against all odds the festivals of Salzburg and Rossini’s Pesaro are forging ahead this summer with real, live opera, though the limited programs and scarcity of tickets may discourage us from journeying to Austria or Italy in August. Would that we could!
Tag: Rossini Opera Festival
Semiramide at the Rossini Opera Festival
The pleasures (immense) and pain of Gioachino Rossini’s Semiramide (Venice, 1823). Uncut.
L’equivoco stravagante in Pesaro
L’equivoco stravagante (The Bizarre Misunderstanding), the 18 year-old Gioachino Rossini’s first opera buffa, is indeed bizarre. Its heroine Ernestina is obsessed by literature and philosophy and the grandiose language of opera seria.
1818 Rossini
at the 2018 Rossini Opera Festival
2018 may mark the 150th anniversary of Rossini’s death but of more interest is that it marks the 200th anniversary of the two operas he composed in 1818 — the one-act farce Adina, though not performed until 1826 in Lisbon (and rarely since) and the “dramma serio” Ricciardo e Zoraide, “a grotesque mixture of stupidities and improbabilities” according to a 1927 Rossini biographer.
Rossini’s Torvaldo e Dorliska in Pesaro
The rare and somewhat interesting Rossini! Torvaldo e Dorliska (1815) comes just after Elisabetta, Regina di Ingleterra (the first of his nineteen operas for Naples) — a huge success, and just before Il barbiere di Siviglia in Rome — a failure.
La pietra del paragone in Pesaro
Impeccable casting — see photos. Three new generation Italian buffos brought startling new life to Pier Luigi Pizzi’s 2002 production of Rossini’s first major comedy (La Scala, 1812).
Le SiËge de Corinthe in Pesaro
That of Rossini (in French) and that of Lord Byron (in English, Russian, Italian and Spanish), the battles of both Negroponte (1470) and of Missolonghi (1826) re-enacted amidst massive piles of plastic water bottles (thousands of them) that collapsed onto the heroine at Mahomet II’s destruction of Corinth.
Turco in Italia in Pesaro
When more is definitely more, and less would indeed be less. Two of the biggest names in Italian theater art collide in an eponymous theater.
ROF Streams Rossini’s
La cambiale di matrimonio
The Rossini festival of Rossini’s hometown, Pesaro, streams the premiere of its new production of La cambiale di matrimonio, Rossini’s second opera on August 8 (and briefly “on demand” after).