Rossini Overture

“this DVD brings compelling accounts of the master at work, visually as well as aurally. There is a powerful intensity to the Beethoven overtures and the opening of William Tell is beautifully done, with glorious playing from the Berliners…There is plenty of fascinating archival material to see; and within the maestro's obviously glamorous, jet-set lifestyle, he emerges as a musical communicator of warmth - and humour too. A most revealing issue.” (The Penguin Guide)

Elisabetta regina d'Inghilterra, marked Rossini's first venture into the San Carlo Theatre in Naples, the most glamorous theatre of that time. The famous impresario Domenico Barbaja, had carefully prepared the launching of the rwenty-three year old composer -with sumptuous scenery, designed by a celebrated archirect, Antonio Niccolini, and engaging a firsr-rate cast. Foremost was Isabella Colbran, who later became Rossini's wife; and tenors — Andrea Nozzari and Manuel Garcia.

The Overture gives the clue: this is the Barber of the nudge and the wink, of the Neapolitan siesta rubato and the rumbustious business. Silvio Varviso, who works his willing orchestra hard enough, tends to operate by exaggerated contrasts of tempo rather than by pointing within the phrasing itself: the cast, similarly, work the comic value of the words rather than the wit of their underlay or inflection.

For the last two decades or so the works of the composer from Pesaro have no longer revealed very many mysteries to the historian and the opera lover, for even Rossini’s rarer works are now regularly performed. A few operas, however, still remained in the archives, among them Ivanhoé, a famous pastiche conceived by Rossini in collaboration with Pacini, his Parisian publisher. Its revival allows us to fill in a chapter of the history of music which had remained incomplete and above all to get to know the work with which Rossini introduced himself to Parisian audiences, before offering them Le Siège de Corinthe. The composer from Pesaro, indeed, had too great a sense of publicity to feed the critics’ curiosity, lightheartedly, a new opera.