Stars in a madhouse

The Rossini Festival ends in Pesaro

The famous opera festival was held for the 31st time and, as always, was very interesting. First, in Pesaro they revived Cinderella, directed by Luca Ronconi with the American tenor Lawrence Brownlee as the Prince (the second bel canto star after Flores to sing at the Metropolitan); secondly, they played the premiere of Rossini’s first stage opera “Demetrius and Polybius” with the wonderful bass Mirko Palazzi (Polybius), as if specially designed to present unimaginable beauties of a tragic kind on stage.

The main discovery was the debut of the young maestro Michele Mariotti, the same age as the festival (also 31 years old). Mariotti's talent was not discovered yesterday - despite his undignified age, he has been directing the orchestra of the Bolognese Teatro Comunale for two years, replacing such masters as Riccardo Chailly and Daniele Gatti. His father, Gianfranco Mariotti, the festival's intendant, was modest for a long time, afraid to present his son at the festival, which he created and made the most prestigious musical forum in Italy. The Patriarch of Russian Studies, Maestro Alberto Zedda, the artistic director of the festival, demanded an immediate invitation to Michele to Pesaro. However, Mariotti Jr. needs no introduction: since last season, the main German and French theaters have been vying with each other to offer him contracts for productions of “The Barber of Seville” and other operas by bel canto creators. In Pesaro he was entrusted with the rehabilitation of Sigismund, an opera with the reputation of being “a failure forever.”

It is worth drawing a parallel with Bayreuth, where this summer another young musician, Andris Nelsons, burst into a whirlwind and blew up the senile foundations of Wagner’s kingdom, having read Lohengrin freshly and purely. Both Nelsons and Mariotti are not included in the galaxy of intellectual conductors like the Englishmen Daniel Harding and Edward Gardner or Teodor Currentzis, still young but very ambitious scholarly maestros. Those come from the prestige of the score - the best Mozart, Stravinsky, Berg, Britten, Richard Strauss. The main thing for them is to show off their university knowledge, and not special musical sensitivity. It is not a fact that Rossini or Tchaikovsky, who are not inferior to Mahler and Berg in terms of popularity with the public, are up to their standards. Mariotti treats Rossini's music as if it were written yesterday. (As well as to Tchaikovsky - Nelson, who brilliantly performed the Pathetic Symphony in Lucerne with a 20-minute standing ovation from the usually indifferent Swiss people.) Mariotti is happy to be transported to the time of Rossini, when the maestro was the favorite toy of proud prima donnas and capricious tenors. He listens sensitively to singers, knows when to mute the wind instruments so as not to foul the solo voice, and when (if nothing important happens on stage) the strings need to be given complete freedom. Every minute he looks at the artists, realizing that they and he, just like he and the orchestra members, are one whole. For the bel canto culture, these qualities are much more important than the ability to read immeasurable meanings into the score.

As for “Sigismund,” which was staged and recorded only a few times in the 20th century, this is another pride of the Pesar festival. Although the forgetfulness of descendants towards Rossini’s legacy is partly true (the maestro made a mistake by trusting the incompetent librettist Giuseppe Foppe), but the music and vocals, when we heard them, turned out to be worthy of a much belated renewal. By the way, in the collection of Rossini’s operas, which have been staged at the festival for 31 years, there are only three gaps left: Adelaide of Burgundy, Cyrus in Babylon and Aurelian in Palmyra have not yet seen the light of day in Pesaro. The rest of the operas, plus all sorts of small vocal works like “The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis” (which appeared this year) have already been performed in Pesaro.

The plot of "Sigismund", the culprit of the failure of the opera at the Venetian theater "La Fenice" (1814), in fact, does not shine with either logic or fascination. The action takes place in Poland. The insidious courtier Vladislav (sung by the popular Rossini tenor Antonino Siragusa) slanders King Sigismund (the brilliant Italian singer and actress Daniela Barcellona dressed as a man) against Queen Aldimira (Russian soprano Olga Peretyatko), accusing her of infidelity. The queen is sentenced to death. This is all in the background, and the opera begins with the king stopping eating and sleeping, doubting the justice of the execution. Meanwhile, the poor woman managed to escape, and she is hiding under a false name, hoping to return her husband and the throne. In the finale, after numerous twists and turns, the spouses are reunited, and the villain and his henchwoman go to prison.

The director was the Venetian Damiano Michieletto with his permanent team (set designer Paolo Fantina and costume designer Carla Teti). In general, they managed to save history from collapse. Sigismund was placed in an infirmary for the mentally ill, decorated in the style of the early 20th century, surrounded by crazy people (magnificently grimacing mimes), and his unfortunate wife was dressed in a lovely nurse costume. Well, the second act, where Aldimira’s father, the Hungarian king, appears and the denouement takes place, takes place in a pompous hall with stained glass windows in wooden frames. The second star of “Sigismund” after Mariotti is Barcellona, ​​a fantastic singer, doomed by fate to forever play male roles. Her “crazy” Sigismund is incredibly good. But, of course, the overall success of the performance was slightly overshadowed by the traditional “boo” for the young directors - the old music lovers did not like the director’s decision. There were even spectators who left the theater and threw away their expensive tickets 20 minutes after the start.

There is another reason to compare Pesaro and Bayreuth. From next year, the festival authorities in Pesaro have promised to streamline the ticket situation by introducing official waiting lists, following the example of Bayreuth. The fact is that Rossini fans, who annually do not make it into the hall, since the demand for tickets significantly exceeds the supply, and the theater is tiny, want to get there at any cost. But if in Germany you can still get tickets for Wagner at exorbitant prices, then in Italy in the modest and non-tourist town of Pesaro it is almost impossible to buy tickets in person. And the further, the worse - not for Rossini, but for his fans, of course. By the way, experts have already calculated that the income from the current festival is three times higher than the expenses - an unprecedented thing. Rossini's shares in Pesaro go up and up. The great Italian is baiting the great German.

Ekaterina BELYAEVA, Pesaro-Moscow