Rossini all downhill after the overture ?

[Barbirollians]

I struggle with Rossini - a lot of the operas seem interminable it just plain boring like Le Comte Ory . Many wonderful tunes but to what ends ?

Great overtures though especially in the cracking LCP/Nortington set . Can forumites explain what I am missing .

[Serial_Apologist]

I struggle with Rossini - a lot of the operas seem interminable it just plain boring like Le Comte Ory . Many wonderful tunes but to what ends ?

Great overtures though especially in the cracking LCP/Nortington set . Can forumites explain what I am missing .

The Mike Westbrook Big Band Rossini versions.

[cloughie]

I struggle with Rossini - a lot of the operas seem interminable it just plain boring like Le Comte Ory . Many wonderful tunes but to what ends ?

Great overtures though especially in the cracking LCP/Nortington set . Can forumites explain what I am missing .

William Tell Ballet Music, String Sonatas, Stabat Mater, Petite Messe Solonelle and with a little help from Respighi - Boutique Fantasque and Rossiniana and Britten with Soirees and Matinees Musicales. But if like me opera is not particularly your bag then ...
There are always the Lone Ranger, Sounds Incorporated and Spike Jones borrowings of William Tell.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

A couple of years ago, I would only have disagreed with Barb's opinion to the extent that I find the Overtures formulaic, overlong, and tiresome. But having seen ON's rather wonderful production of La Cerentola, I was utterly captivated. I'd also listened to Moses in Egypt many years ago while I was studying Schoenberg's Mose und Aron and was a lot more impressed than I'd expected to be. I feel much keener to explore his operas now than at any previous time in my life. (And just enough time in the Overtures to make a cup of tea.)

[jean]

The trouble is, we see so few of his operas here.

Go to Pesaro is my advice.

[Dave2002]

The trouble is, we see so few of his operas here.

Go to Pesaro is my advice.

Sounds interesting. One of the photos shows an outdoor audience - so maybe not so good if it rains. We have been to concerts in Italy which were curtailed (very slightly) by the onset of rain. Of course this is a hazard which could occur at other venues, such as Verona - but it didn’t rain on the occasions when we went there.

[gurnemanz]

We turned up to Semiramide at ROH last year, not knowing the opera at all apart from the overture and had a great evening. It looked good and sounded marvellous with superb orchestral playing and singing from Joyce DiDonato, Lawrence Brownlee (electrifying high notes) and others. The staging which suggested parallels with modern totalitarian states had some idiosyncratic touches but was fair enough as an interpretation as far as I'm concerned.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Semiramide takes nearly four hours without intervals.

Makes you wonder how long a whole ramide lasts.



('salright - I've already got me coat.)

[jean]

Sounds interesting. One of the photos shows an outdoor audience - so maybe not so good if it rains...

There were no outdoor performances when I was there - it's not like Verona!

There's a lovely classic Italian opera house.

And when you'd seen that year's productions, you could go downstairs in the Rossini museum and play videos of previous Festival performances for as long as you wanted.

[subcontrabass]

I struggle with Rossini - a lot of the operas seem interminable it just plain boring like Le Comte Ory . Can forumites explain what I am missing.

I saw a production of Le Comte Ory at Sadler's Wells in the early 1960s. It was very entertaining - the "nuns" chorus was hilarious. The plot may be thin but a good production should compensate.

[richardfinegold]

Well, there’s always the Barber of Seville. Preferably the Bugs Bunny version.
Question for Jean: we have a friend that moved here from Pesaro in the nineties but goes back every summer. She is always trying to get us to visit and attend the festival, but her pictures show performances an outdoor venue, so are some performances outdoors?
Wasn’t Beethoven furious that Rossin’s popularity had exceeded his own in Vienna?

[jean]

Question for Jean: we have a friend that moved here from Pesaro in the nineties but goes back every summer. She is always trying to get us to visit and attend the festival, but her pictures show performances an outdoor venue, so are some performances outdoors?

Earlier in this thread I confidently sait they weren't. But it's a long tiime since I've been.

Looking at this year's programme, I see that performances are listed for the Teatro Rossini and the Auditorium Pedrotti , both very attractive spaces.

I remember also a big uninteresting venue rather like a sports hall - this may have been the Adriatic Arena, which opened in 1996, the year I went. But it's under cover, so I am not sure where your friend's pictures were taken.

I see that Juan Diego Florez is returning this year in Ricciardo e Zoriade. If I'd realised in time I might have built my summer around the Festival!

[Dave2002]

Jean

The picture at the bottom of the link you provided clearly shows an outdoor venue.

http://www.rossinioperafestival.it/

Maybe the photo is generic, and doesn’t apply.

[Serial_Apologist]

One thing which shouldn't go unremarked is Hans Werner Henze's adoration for the operas of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, whose music he saw as an inspirational antidote to the "heavy" (his word) Germanic post-Wagnerian influence on his own country's tradition - which is to say Germany's, although Henze was by that time residing in Italy.

That's quite a controversial point of view, and undoubtedly a very personal one, given that Henze had escaped a climate, both pre-war and post-war, which was authoritarian and homophobic in the land of his birth, which would have sidelined for him how German composers of the First Weimar Republic era of the 1920s such as Weill, Eisler and Krenek had boldly sought to break the Wagnerian link, particularly in their Zeitopern. And I rather think he judged that authoritarianism as extending into the, for him, doctrinaire post-Webernian serialism dominating new German music in the early 1950s. Personally, for me it is fortunate that Henze's "adaptation" of the spirit of Rossini & co in such operas as Der Junge Lord and Elegie for Young Lovers succeeded in sublimating the idiomatic correlative to that spirit so well as to obscure effectively all stylistic references to it; and as you can tell I'm not a great advocate of Italian opera from Donizetti to Verdi, not even the "political" Verdi, though I love Puccini and especially the operatic tradition as re-realised by Malipiero and later Italian composers including Dallapiccola, Nono and Berio.

[jean]

Jean

The picture at the bottom of the link you provided clearly shows an outdoor venue.

The caption refers to a call for tenders associatied with fundraising [sic!]

I don't know what the image is of, but it doesn't correspond to any advertised performance of anything.