This one-act comic opera set in exotic Baghdad is full of witty misunderstandings and trademark Rossini musical features including high C's for the tenor and stunning coloratura for the soprano.
Lisette Oropesa in Adina at Pesaro Photo: Rossini Opera Festival
ROSSINI: Adina
Sunday 10 November 2019 at 6.00pm on RNZ Concert
Cast:
Vito Priante (Califo), Lisette Oropesa (Adina), Levy Sekgapane (Selimo), Matteo Macchioni (Alì), David Giangregorio (Mustafà), Gioachino Rossini Symphony Orchestra and Teatro della Fortuna M. Agostini Chorus conducted by Diego Matheuz
(recorded at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro by RAI)
Rossini composed this opera during the summer of 1818, at Bologna, having been commissioned by a Portuguese officer, and it was performed for the first time at the São Carlos Theatre, Lisbon, on the 12th June 1826.
The director of this production at the Rossini Opera Festival in the composer's home town of Pesaro is Rosetta Cucchi. She says, "With a plot well-known and well used in the opera house, the story of Rossini’s 'Adina', full of witty misunderstandings and with a veil of melancholy, is impregnated with a fascinating exotic colouring, hence its inevitable sub-title 'The Caliph of Baghdad', carrying us at once into the heart of one of the tales so astutely told by Sheherazade. But we should like to tell this tale in a different way, perhaps at five o’clock in the afternoon, together with a cup of tea, rigorously Earl Grey, through the slightly colonial eyeglass of travelling Englishmen who, in the early years of the last century, loved to plunge into the exotic within their dominions with something of the fantastic air of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, surrounded by gigantic objects and little warrens opening into hidden worlds.”
A scene from Adina at Pesaro Photo: Rossini Opera Festival
Cucchi continues, “Looking over those inner images, the mirror of fable, we have chosen just one, enlarging it so that it will completely dominate front centre stage where, from beginning to end, this object out of dreams, which is also the dream of the subject of the story, will dominate everything, a presence like a totem symbolising the marriage waited for like a succulent Godot. Being a projection of the dream-world, it can be dismantled, it is full of surprises, alive in the open air or in a box covered in a delightful wrapping-paper, and above all it is always ready to follow the twists and turns of the story.”
