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Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Rossini: La Gazza Ladra
Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:
The magpie is a European bird resembling a crow that has a chattering, screeching call and a curious habit of flying off with small, shiny objects. 'The Thieving Magpie" was the title given to a French melodrama about a humble servant girl who was sentenced to death for a theft she did not commit. The mischievous birdie screeches out the girl's name in accusation. In the end it's revealed that the magpie was the real culprit. "The Thieving Magpie" or "The Servant Girl of Paliseau" was enormously popular in Napoleonic times. In short order the play was adapted for the operatic stage.
Gioacchino Rossini set it to music to an Italian language libretto as La Gazza Ladra (1817). Rossini's operatic version of the story has the obligatory happy ending and injected some comic and folksy elements, hence the Italians thought of it as an opera semiseria. Rossini's music for La Gazza Ladra is admired today for its pathos, highlighting the tragic over the buffo component of that hybrid form.
There's a new recording of La Gazza Ladra in circulation. It was made live in performance at the twenty first annual Rossini in Wildbad Summer Festival in 2009. The recording was co-produced by Southwest German Radio on location in Bad Wildbad, Germany. Alberto Zedda leads an orchestra brought in for the production from the Czech Republic, the Virtuosi Brunensis who hail from the city of Brno or Brunn in what was once the province known as Moravia. Zedda has prepared a new critical edition of Rossini's score for "The Magpie." The Classica Choir of Brno also took part in the musical proceedings. The cast of vocal soloists assembled for this production was truly international. This is a long opera, put into a three-CD Naxos set which hit the market earlier this year.
An older recording I have broadcast twice previously, in 1991 and 2002, likewise filled out three Sony Classical compact discs (Gelmetti, Radio Turin co-prod., Teatro Rossini).