Rossini
Il turco in Italia – Opera buffa in two Acts to a libretto by Felice Romani [Sung in Italian with English surtitles]
Zaida – Grace Durham
Albazar – Rhys Batt
Prosdocimo – Ross Ramgobin
Don Geronio – Fabio Capitanucci
Donna Fiorilla – Inna Demenkova
Selim – Michael Mofidian
Don Narciso – Agustín Gómez
Girlfriend – Anna-Marie Sullivan
Glyndebourne Chorus and Sinfonia
Olivia Clarke
Mariame Clément – Director
Ian Rutherford – Revival Designer
Julia Hansen – Designer
Bernd Purkrabek – Lighting Designer
David Fricker – Video Designer
Reviewed by: Curtis Rogers
Reviewed: 12 October, 2024
Venue: Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Lewes, East Sussex, England
Long before writers in the 20th century, such as Pirandello, Brecht, Ionesco or Beckett experimented in plays and novels with the concept of the author’s role in his or her own work, or with the notion of a drama within a drama, in their 1814 opera Il turco in Italia, Rossini and his accomplished librettist Felice Romani already presented the innovative conceit of a poet searching for a plot that evolves during the course of the work.
In the original, Prosdocimo, experiencing writer’s block, finds inspiration on encountering the exotic world of the gypsies in his native Naples, and the plot for a new work more or less writes itself. Mariame Clément’s clever and witty production takes the idea of metatheatre a step further. During the Overture we have already seen Prosdocimo feted as a famous writer at a book signing – and acquire a girlfriend from among his fans, who remains as a silent extra for the rest of the action, an artistic sidekick upon whom he can test ideas, or who sometimes takes the initiative herself. Deciding what subject to tackle for his next work, Act One then proceeds with its characters as, essentially, a figment of Prosdocimo’s imagination, jostling around his desk at the centre of the stage for attention and seeking to be forged into literary form, or defying or angrily protesting the ideas he has for them (Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author a possible precedent). The video projection shows his ideas and sketches taking shape on paper as he contemplates some ideas and rejects others. The gypsies are considered as a ‘countercultural’ and ‘life-affirming’ idea; he reflects on whether the novel should be absurdist and comical, or neo-realist; or he decides to update the basic setting from the late 19th century to the 1950s. Crucially, his thoughts interpret or interrogate the assumptions of gender and class of the original opera to make us, the audience, engage with the questions that Rossini’s opera raise in the 21st century, and whether the opera doesn’t already foreshadow our preoccupations – for instance, is Fiorilla, with her extramarital lovers ‘promiscuous’ or ‘liberated’?
Combining an aura both of social reality and comedy, Prosdocimo settles upon making Fiorilla’s unhappy husband, Geronio, the owner of a delicatessen, and her present lover Narciso his assistant, so that the action of Act Two unfolds there with greater autonomy and the Poet is largely absent. The production downplays the notion of the visiting Turk, Selim, as an exotic, Oriental other, by having him as a car mechanic, usually in everyday attire like an alluring James Dean figure and less frequently in traditionally florid Ottoman garb. When he and his accomplices do appear it’s clear that they are not to be taken seriously but rather as stock characters of this once-prevalent type of opera buffa which compared national personalities. Indeed, by the time of Rossini’s opera, the fearsome bogeyman of the warring Ottoman had passed away as a real military threat and so writers for the stage could afford to take a more relaxed, relieved view of the Turkish temperament. Clement wisely sidesteps politicising the (non-)issue, therefore, and so preserves the genial, comic temper of the whole.
If the characters exist largely in Prosdocimo’s mind on stage, musically they are fully embodied by the vivacious cast, above all Inna Demenkova’s colourful Fiorilla, which encompasses knowing charm and self-pity on one hand, fiery defiance and joyful abandon on the other with great tonal agility across her range. Ross Ramgobin is a thoughtful Prosdocimo, if a little dry on higher notes, while Fabio Capitanucci sustains an irritable energy as Geronio. Michael Mofidian and Agustín Gómez make for ardent lovers as the eponymous Turk and Narciso respectively, the latter more excitable and volatile than the former, who is more suavely controlled. Grace Durham combines an air of melancholy with her exacting, lyrical account of the gypsy fortune teller Zaida, a former lover of Selim’s who is eventually reunited with him.
The Glyndebourne Sinfonia sound a little recessed or immersed in the pit, such that the score doesn’t sparkle quite so brightly as it might, but equally the singers are never overwhelmed and consequently the vocal lines are conveyed with lucid precision. There is also no doubt that Olivia Clarke has the measure of the music’s dynamic pace and vitality in her assured, unfussy grasp.
Overall, the production constitutes a wonderful affirmation of the creative process and the artistic imagination – light-hearted, but not lightweight in Clément’s astute interpretation. It’s all the more a pity then that, with Arts Council funding cuts, the production is unable to go on tour around the country and fewer people will be able to see it as a result, missing out on the chance to reflect on and exult in humankind’s need for creative and aesthetic engagement with the world at large, especially in our age of philistine leaders and the advance of cerebrally sterile artificial intelligence. Rossini offers an uplifting antidote to that.
Further performances to 30 October