Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Rossini: Il Turco in Italia

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Although they weren't much impressed with it, the first-night audience in Milan naturally regarded Gioacchino Rossini's Il Turco in Italia (1814) as the obvious sequel to his highly popular L'Italiana in Algieri from the previous year. True, there are some similarities to be found in these masterworks of the Italian opera buffa. But Rossini wrote all new music for "The Turk in Italy." He borrowed nothing from "The Italian Girl in Algiers," or any of his previous operas (unusual for him). "The Turk" played all over Europe, then fell out of the repertoire in the mid nineteenth century. The great Maria Callas sang the role of Fiorilla to thunderous acclaim in Rome in 1950 and again in Milan in 1955.

I have featured recordings of "The Turk" on Sundays in August of 1987, 1997, 2006, and most recently the Urania CD release of a 1958 mono airtape of an RAI Radio Italy broadcast from Milan starring soprano Graziella Sciutti (Sunday, August 7, 2022). That recording unfortunately worked from an old score corrupted with cuts, extrapolations, and inaccuracies. The recording made in 1997 in Milan's Giuseppe Verdi Hall presents us with the musically complete opera, restoring Rossini's own revisions and the secco recitatives as given in the critical edition published by the Rossini Foundation of Pesaro, the composer's birthplace. Roberto Chailly conducts the orchestra and chorus of the famed Teatro alla Scala. Mezzo Cecilia Bartoli takes on the soprano role of the Italian girl, Fiorilla, opposite baritone Michele Pertusi as Selim, the Turkish prince. A 1998 Decca/Polygram release on two silver discs.