Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
PESARO, Italy It is a tricky business to dedicate a music festival to a single composer.
Bayreuth, the oldest of modern festivals, manages quite well with the 10 mature operas of Richard Wagner, even if critics routinely urge new repertoire as a source of fresh blood. Festivals emphasizing one composer are more likely to follow the example of Salzburg, where Mozart remains the favorite son, but offerings vary widely. In the city of Pesaro on the Adriatic Sea, Gioachino Rossini, born there in 1792, is king. The city's beachfront restaurants and hotels are surely an asset, but the Rossini Opera Festival here has a formula that attracts audiences with Rossini and Rossini alone. The festival's three annual opera productions and most of its supplementary events are devoted to the Swan of Pesaro, as the composer was known, though a departure was made this year for the 250th birthday of Mozart (a composer Rossini revered) when the one-act "Die Schuldigkeit des Ersten Gebots," composed when the Austrian was 11, was offered in a double bill. Opera enthusiasts who know Rossini only through "The Barber of Seville" will be astonished at the breadth of his operatic output. His Italian operas embrace serious and comic works plus an intermediary "sentimental" genre known as opera semiseria.
And before retiring from the opera stage at age 37 (with three decades of life ahead of him), he wrote important works in French for Paris.
His popularity and influence were extraordinary, but in the late 19th-century his operas went into decline, a victim of changing singing styles and also, probably, of a Germanic bias against a composer who, rather than producing "high art," wrote quickly for popular consumption in busy theaters. Possibly because of that neglect, little-known gems among Rossini's operas are still awaiting discovery. Encountering them in a Pesaro production can be a fresh and exciting experience, particularly when presented in a new critical edition from Pesaro's Rossini Foundation.
But a brouhaha developed earlier this year after the renowned American Rossini scholar Philip Gossett was effectively dismissed as director of the new Rossini edition when his contract was not renewed.
No official explanation was given by the foundation, but Bruno Cagli, its artistic director, said in an interview that a governing committee has taken over Gossett's duties. Gossett, reached by telephone during a research trip to St. Petersburg, said he thought the festival's general director, Gianfranco Mariotti, and its artistic director, the Rossini conductor Alberto Zedda, brought pressure to bear on the foundation because of criticisms Gossett had made about the festival.
Among the points that Gossett said he had questioned were decisions to cast an operatic role originally written for a mezzo soprano with a soprano, thereby requiring extensive rewriting of the vocal part, and to insert into another opera an unrelated aria. "If the festival wants to promote itself as an organization with a link to scholarship, it should at least pay attention to what scholars say," Gossett said.
Quoted in the Pesaro edition of the Rome newspaper Il Messaggero, Mariotti alluded to a rivalry between Gossett and Zedda, mentioning "old stories and diverging points of view between musicologists.
"When Zedda became artistic director of the festival, Gossett began to attack him," Mariotti added. A rapprochement remains a possibility, but in the meantime Gossett is exploring the option of taking his coterie of scholars to the German publishing firm Bärenreiter. Twenty-nine Rossini titles have so far been published, but Cagli estimates that another 30 years of work remain. The flap had little impact on the smooth functioning of the festival, which ended Monday. The principal novelty was "Torvaldo e Dorliska," an opera semiseria from 1815 performed in accordance with a new edition by Francesco Paolo Russo. No doubt it was hoped that the producer Mario Martone would replicate his success two years ago with "Matilde di Shabran," another opera semiseria. If he failed to do so, it was only because "Torvaldo" as an opera didn't quite measure up to "Matilde"?
this is the sort of thing one travels to Pesaro to discover.
In "Torvaldo," which is set in an unspecified region of Northern Europe, the corrupt Duke of Ordow lusts after the Polish woman Dorliska despite her devotion to her husband, Torvaldo. A peasant uprising puts an end to the duke's rule and the couple's ordeal, but not before he sings a furious aria of defiance that won the fine baritone Michele Pertusi an ovation.
Under Víctor Pablo Pérez's alert baton, Darina Takova and Francesco Meli were a winning pair of lovers, and Bruno Praticò brought comic panache to the retainer Giorgio.
Martone's arresting production, with sets by Sergio Tramonti, had characters singing from the aisles and ingeniously depicted the hostile forest surrounding the duke's castle, while leaving the castle itself to the audience's imagination. I missed the double bill in which youthful Mozart was paired with early Rossini, but I did see "L'Italiana in Algergi" in a production created in 1994 by the celebrated Italian leftist Dario Fo. He had a hilarious romp with Rossini's "Il Viaggio a Reims" in Helsinki a few years ago, but the comic
busyness here, which included turning a variety of (fake) jungle animals loose on stage along with a flying manikin, fell flat. I did not interpret the boos that the animals received at curtain calls as a comment on Fo's politics. As the take-charge Italian Isabella, Marianna Pizzolato sang with hearty mezzo tones, and Maxim Mironov displayed a sweet, flexible tenor as her sweetheart Lindoro. Donato Renzetti led a smoothly coordinated performance.
International Herald Tribune
c.2005 I.H.T /iht.com
