Rossini - La donna del lago (Riccardo Muti, June Anderson, Rockwell Blake, Giorgio Surjan, Chris Merritt) [2004 / 1992]

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Rossini - La donna del lago (Riccardo Muti, June Anderson, Rockwell Blake, Giorgio Surjan, Chris Merritt) [2004 / 1992]

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This DVD would appeal mainly to a selected group of bel canto enthusiasts who lose sleep at night trying get rare recordings of rare operas from the bel canto repertoire. The audio from this performance circulated for a while (on the Philips label) and was difficult to find; this issue is therefore a treasure from that perspective. It represents one of the peaks of the bel canto revival movement of the past 20 years. The vast expansion of the bel canto repertoire and the revival of Rossini's lesser known works enabled the best singers of the new generation to specialize and develop their vocal talents to the point that some of them surpassed their distinguished predecessors - Callas, Sutherland, Caballé, Sills. June Anderson has been a major force in the bel canto revival. She often shared the stage with Blake, Merritt, and other bel canto tenors. This is the only commercially available document of such a performance. These Rossini coloratura roles are extremely taxing. The tenor roles in particular constitute a professional health hazard with their impossibly cruel high tessitura. Rossini's writing for the male voices is such that the whole performance turns into a dangerous athletic enterprise, where the suspense is not only centered around "is he going to make it to the next note?" but also "will his voice survive this evening?". It is a testament to the singers' training and good health that none of them was carried from the stage on a stretcher.
A less visible hero of this performance is the conductor Riccardo Muti. Albert Innaurato wrote in his article titled "INSIDE LA SCALA: TEMPLE OF MUSIC OR TEMPLE OF DOOM?" in Opera News magazine, July 1999: `Riccardo Muti is the world's most publicly detested conductor. In her book Cinderella and Company, Manuela Hoelterhoff calls him "the famously short maestro of fear".' IMHO he is one of the century's greatest conductors and could have reached Toscanini's fame had he not tied the knot with La Scala's lion's den. It would be a cliché to call him a "Rossini scholar": he conducts this opera with sensitivity, discipline and just the right amount of vigor without distorting Rossini's simple and linear composition style by underlining crescendos or changes in rhythm excessively to achieve a crowd pleasing effect.
Herzog's stage evokes Walter Scott's northern romantic atmosphere to which he adds some Gothic accents. His set designer uses huge fantasia-like sets with immense stalactites coming down from nowhere and the whole scenery changing in concentric circles - best appreciated in fast forward. The fairy-tale element that seems to be Herzog's forte reaches its smashing climax at the finale, in the throne room scene.
So what's the problem? The stage is so dark you can hardly see the details, and that is on top of the usual problems with the La Scala re-issues (because of problems with getting the rights, in large measure because of region coding, the Image releases have rights only to the previous LaserDisc masters with titles, not to the source material without). It was unfortunately in vogue at the time to use dimly lit scenery for "dark" subjects. This trend reverberated in some MET productions including the last "Ring" (despite the wonderful music the darkness beckoned me to sweet sleep at both the Rheingold and Die Walküre earlier this year. This silliness has to stop, you can't sit for hours in semi-darkness past dinnertime without falling asleep to the lullaby coming from the stage). The audio is good (obviously not as good as the new 5.1 Dolby surround DVD's). This DVD is gradually becoming difficult to get.

By Noam Eitan

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Rossini - La donna del lago (Riccardo Muti, June Anderson, Rockwell Blake, Giorgio Surjan, Chris Merritt) [2004 / 1992]

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