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 culprit. "The Thieving Magpie, or The Servant Girl of Palaiseau" 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 with some comic and folksy touches added; hence the Italians thought of it as an opera semiseria. Rossini's music for La Gazza Ladra is admired today for its pathos, giving more weight to the serious over the buffa components of that hybrid genre. This particular Rossini opera is a personal favorite of mine, which I'm pleased to present again in the same Naxos CD release I drew upon for my broadcast of Sunday, October 11, 2015.

La Gazza Ladra was recorded live in performance at the twenty first 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 prepared a new critical edition of Rossini's score for "The Magpie." The Classical Chamber Choir of Brno also took part in the musical proceedings.

There's an international cast of vocal soloists. There's an older recording of "The Magpie" made in Pesaro, the composer's home town, in 1989 at the Rossini Opera Festival. The Sony Classical CD release features the voices of soprano Katia Ricciarelli and Samuel Ramey, with Gianluigi Gelmetti conducting the Symphony Orchestra of Radio Italy Turin. That "Magpie" went over the air on Sunday, April 28, 1991, and was subsequently rebroadcast.