W hen Rossini died in 1868, Verdi tried to arrange for a group of composers to pen a requiem mass in memory of their illustrious predecessor. It never got finished, and Verdi went on to use his intended contribution in his own Requiem, dedicated to the memory of someone quite different. But such a reaction to Rossini’s death before long became perplexing in itself, because Rossini was soon only being remembered for his sparkling comedies. Was this essentially lightweight figure really such a significant trailblazer, later generations were to ask.
The truth was that the opera world had, after the musical earthquake caused by Wagner, forgotten the non-comic operas that had made Rossini famous as a young man. It’s only when you listen to them that you begin to understand why Verdi was so overwhelmed at his predecessor’s death.
Rossini’s two big early successes were Tancredi, a dramatization of a tragedy by Voltaire, and Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra (Elizabeth, Queen of England), and both are well worth investigating.
Tancredi, composed when Rossini was 21, launched him onto the international stage. There are now several versions available on DVD, and the 2005 release of a production from the 1992 Schwetzinger Festival can be recommended. The visual quality is excellent, and so is the sound.
The role of Tancredi is taken by a contralto, Bernadette Manca di Nissa, and she sings with finesse. Maria Bayo is outstanding as Amenaide, as are Raul Gimenez as Argirio and Ildebrando d’Arcangelo as Orbazzano.
Rossini wrote two different endings to the opera and, after performing the work with the tragic one, conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti gets up on stage and announces that the company will now perform the happy one. It only lasts three minutes, but it’s nice to have them both all the same. The director and designer of this admirable venture, played here on a very small stage, was Pier Luigi Pizzi.
E lisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra is only available in a single DVD version, filmed in Turin in 1985, and compared with Tancredi the visual and sound quality are poor. Even so, it shows why the young Rossini became confirmed as a celebrity when it was first produced in Naples in 1815.
It opens with a shock — the overture to The Barber of Seville! The explanation is uncomplicated — Rossini simply re-used it for his later comedy. Then the curtain rises on the drama of Elizabeth and Leicester — her successful general but also her lover. The scheming Norfolk soon reveals to Elizabeth that Leicester secretly married while campaigning against the Scots, and that his wife is one of the Scottish prisoners the queen has pardoned and made her household pages.
This pair of DVDs lacks the sophistication we expect these days — it’s as if someone had simply pointed a camera at a stage and then added a few close-ups. But the singing is generally excellent. Lella Cuberli as Elisabeth produces all the necessary vocal flourishes and also acts extremely convincingly. American tenor Rockwell Blake is exceptionally strong as the villainous Norfolk, notably in the scene with a chorus of guards on the second DVD. And Antonio Savastano as Leicester does justice to the music’s complexity and verve.
The opera ends abruptly, without the expected ensemble. And it’s true the story veers away from what was probably the historical reality. But this was drama, not documentary, and the product as a whole is of value in demonstrating again what Rossini’s serious early operas were really like.
S ony/BMG has just released a new CD — a set of songs by the English Renaissance composer John Dowland entitled In Darkness Let Me Dwell. It comes from a group of young musicians who in the notes pay tribute to the singer Sting and refer to the black dwarf Sirius B. Also in the notes is the opinion that what distinguishes human from other life is humor, love and “the realization of our own annihilation through death, which results in despair and depression … which can only be relieved by its transformation into melancholy art.”
The performance is conventional enough, however. Dorothee Mields sings with commitment to the accompaniment of a lute and a consort of viols, but the unvarying melancholy — relieved only by the Earl of Essex, His Galliard — makes this music hard to take. It isn’t surprising that it’s best known through use in productions of plays by Shakespeare, whose philosophy, it could be argued, isn’t far removed from the one expressed above.
L astly, United Music in Taiwan is promoting Andre Rieu’s DVD Christmas Around the World. The difficulty with it is that Christmas is a time for parties, but Rieu’s concerts are all parties anyway. His problem, therefore, is how to make this different from his usual fare, and he doesn’t come up with an answer. Filmed in Trier, Germany, and first released for Christmas 2006, it contains a choir of “little angels” from Nagasaki (provoking affectionate laughter with We Wish You a Merry Clistmas) but not a lot else that other festive products don’t contain.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist