Various - Fortunio - DVD

Various - Fortunio [BLU-RAY] Released 2020 product/publication from Naxos

Rossini had a truly explosive effect when, at the age of eighteen, his comic one-act farce La cambiale di matrimonio was staged at the San Moisé theatre in Venice, on the evening of November 3rd, 1810. From that moment, Rossini's career would be a series of masterpieces, with triumphs and flops. It was in the comic genre that he achieved his greatest successes, with works such as L'Italiana in Algeri (1813), Il Turco in Italia (1814), Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816), and Cenerentola in 1817, which was Rossini's last great comic work in the traditional sense. Between 1817 and 1819, year of that Guillaume Tell that prematurely cut short his operatic career, Rossini composed fifteen serious operas and only three comic ones; but he had already given his best in his incomparable youth, with the four incredible masterpieces that are in this box set. In this DYNAMIC assembles some of the most famous opera buffa by Rossini, played by great performers, conductors and directors, including some rarely performed works such La Gazzetta, L'Equivoco stravagante, La Cambiale di matrimonio.

The first misconception that the Rossini Renaissance has gradually corrected is that Rossini was only able to excel in the comic genre. Rossini's serious operas, as a matter of fact, are not only overall of high artistic quality but also quite original. Indeed, they had a huge influence on the Italian Romantic output of Donizetti, Bellini, Pacini, Mercadante and of the first Verdi. We could go as far as to say that Rossini was not merely an Italian phenomenon but a European one, whose arrival had the explosive effect of a bomb sweeping away centuries-old conventions and manners of speaking and introducing, in their place, a series of new codes and attitudes which all 19th-century opera drew upon; also and perhaps especially in the serious genre. This collector's boxset offers an interesting selection of Rossini's main opera seria (and semiseria, with reference to La Gazza Ladra) played by great interpreters, conductors and directors, live recorded in prestigious venues such as Rossini Opera Festival (ROF) with the philological approach granted by Fondazione Rossini of Pesaro. Such titles as Torvaldo e Dorliska, Ermione, Bianca e Falliero are less knowns works as well.