Cecilia Bartoli is joined by frequent collaborators Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier in a fun-filled Rossini farce full of Italian sunshine. Big grins all round.
La gazza ladra celebrates its 200th anniversary with a new production at La Scala, an earthbound effort from director Gabriele Salvatores, but it was Riccardo Chailly who drew the wrath of sections of the Milanese audience.
Theatre director Christoph Marthaler is renowned – if notorious – for his “off the wall” productions and adherence to bad boy antics. This Viaggio was no exception.
After an absence of 145 years, Teato alla Scala staged Gioachino Rossini's Otello in a painterly Jürgen Flimm production, sparse set inspired by conversations with Anselm Kiefer.
Alden’s mise-en-scène developed the most modern aspects of Il turco's libretto. The stage not only showed what the Poet was participating towards, but the other characters also seemed to perform the poet’s conception of his own work.
Verdi’s Otello opens with a fierce storm raging over Cyprus. In Rossini’s version, composed 71 years earlier in 1816, the composer eschewed the Cypriot setting entirely and the storm doesn’t take place until Act III, although last night a mighty crack of thunder resounded over the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées as the audience filed into the opera house.
The opening of the Teatro Real’s season in Madrid has been anything but uneventful. However, Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, the ever-pleasing opera chosen to welcome back an expectant audience, had very little to do with it.
Bartoli visitó Madrid como parte de su gira celebratoria del aniversario de Rossini y ofreció una actuación para disfrutar de su temperamento como personaje irrepetible y show-woman definitiva.
