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Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Rossini: La Cenerentola
Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:
The Cinderella fairy tale has always appealed to opera composers. The French composer Jules Massenet was one. I have broadcast Massenet's Cendrillon (1899), as she's called in French, twice in times long past: Sundays in 1989 and 1995. There's also Rodgers and Hammerstein's made-for-TV American musical version of Cinderella (1957). The CD reissue of the original cast recording (Columbia Broadway Masterworks LP) went over the air on Sunday, July 15, 2001.
The finest operatic interpretation of the Cinderella story has got to be the work of Gioacchino Rossini. His Italian language La Cenerentola (1817) I have presented several times before in various recordings, under different directorial hands: Sunday, July 29, 1984 (Fabritis); Sunday, December 27, 1998 (Chailly, with mezzo Cecilia Bartoli); and most recently, Sunday, July 31, 2016 (Abbado).
The 2007 production of La Cenerentola at Glyndebourne was recorded live in performance, but that recording was not issued on silver disc until 2013, when it appeared under the proprietary label of the opera house: Glyndebourne Enterprises, Ltd. For the first time in its long history (founded 1934) the Glyndebourne opera house invited a period instrument orchestra to take part in their La Cenerentola staging. Vladimir Jurowski lead the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment along with the Glyndebourne Chorus. Starring in the title role was mezzo Ruxandra Donose.
Jurowski's conducting of this Rossini masterpiece is spirited and propels things right along the way Rossini's lighthearted music requires. However, only now after so many years of opera broadcasting do I fully understand that La Cenerentola is not a comic work, an opera buffa. Rossini styled it a dramma giocoso, i.e., a serious romantic melodrama with a happy ending and some humorous touches. Also, this lyric theatrical version of the Cinderella story does away with the magic elements, ie. no fairy godmother.