Sigismondo

Strong production of a rare early Rossini work
Updating an opera and setting it in an asylum isn't a terribly original idea and it does usually have a sense of desperation about it, but there is of course a tradition of mad scenes in bel canto opera, so it's not necessarily inappropriate. All the more so since Rossini's rarely heard 1814 opera Sigismondo actually opens with a mad scene of sorts rather than builds up to one, where Sigismondo, the king of Poland, is still tormented by the loss of his wife Aldimira, who he had executed 15 years ago on account of accusations of infidelity that had been laid against her. Sigismondo belongs in this respect to another traditional opera theme then, that of innocent women unjustly accused of infidelity or having their maidenly honour called into question by a jealous admirer who has had his advances rejected. Starting the way it does however, already wading in the depths of madness, Rossini's Sigismondo would seem to have other ambitions towards a psychological drama more closely...

A Failure but Recycled into New Life
Grove's Dictionary of Opera says of Sigismondo (Venice 1814)that this is arguable Rossini's most unrevivable serious opera and I must agree. If the cast and this production can't bring it to life than nothing will. The production is excellent. It tries by setting this story of a mentally unstable king who believes he has be betrayed by an unfaithful wife and goes off kilter in an insane asylum. This means a lot of extras trotting around doing crazy things (silently) while the main characters are spouting one dizzying bel canto line after another. The king is the well established true bel canto mezzo Daniela Barcellona (a "pants" role). She is devine. I can't help but play her sections over and over again. She is a consumate artist of this style of music.
The true find of this recording is rising star Olga Peretyatko who plays the king's unjustly maligned wife Aldimira. She is a superb singer of strong full voice and great physical as well as vocal beauty. I think it worth the...

Was Rossini a Baroque Composer?
Was Mozart? It might be fun to argue the affirmative in a debate tournament. Consider some evidence:

* The loopy libretti he chose, most of them, would have served equally well for operas by Handel or Hasse. There isn't a speck of compromising plausibility about any of them. Rossini's "humor" is far closer to 18th C opera than to, for example, Offenbach.

* The story-line of a Rossini opera -- Sigismondo is a good example -- is advanced chiefly in the recitativos and ariosos, while the arias are devoted to generic expressions of emotions. That's why Rossini, like Vivaldi and Handel, was able to re-cycle his best arias from opera to opera without any sense of shameful incongruity.

* Rossini's operas generally follow the Baroque structures of alternating recitativos with ABA da capo arias. Rossini got wily with his da capos. He extended the B sections, tacked in extra B sections, rewrote the da capo A sections in musically clever ways, but the...

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