"La Cenerentola" by Gioachino Rossini: from 20th to 27th September 2024
The first opera of the Maggio Theater's fall revival.
Back on the program starting Sept. 20 is “La cenerentola,” by Gioachino Rossini.
On the podium is Gianluca Capuano, direction is by Manu Lalli.
Four performances total. Sept. 20, 22 at 3:30 p.m., 24 and 27.
The Sept. 17 dress rehearsal at 8 p.m. is open to young audiences up to age 30, thanks to Unicoop Firenze
Florence, 17th September 2024 – The Teatro del Maggio resumes its opera programming with Gioachino Rossini's La cenerentola, or goodness in triumph. The premiere is scheduled for Sept. 20 at 8 p.m. and repeats on the 22nd ( at 3:30 p.m.), then Sept. 24 and 27 at 8 p.m. On the Podium of the Maggio Orchestra and Chorus is Gianluca Capuano. The direction is by Manu Lalli. The director of the Chorus is Lorenzo Fratini. In the part of Cinderella/Angelina, mezzo-soprano Teresa Iervolino, with her Patrick Kabongo (Don Ramiro), William Hernandez (Dandini), Marco Filippo Romano (Don Magnifico), Maria Laura Iacobellis (Clorinda), Aleksandra Meteleva (Tisbe), Matteo D'Apolito (Alidoro). The dress rehearsal on Sept. 17 at 8 p.m. thanks to Unicoop Firenze is open free of charge to an audience of young people up to age 30.
The staging, last seen at the Maggio in 2018 for the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the composer's death, stems from the 2017 abridged staging conceived for young and very young audiences, again by Manu Lalli for Venti Lucenti, and then expanded for “the grown-ups” again in June 2017 at the Pitti Palace. In Lalli's version full of wit and charm, many of the fairy-tale features of the plot freely drawn from Perrault and which Rossini had nevertheless sidelined in favor of comic and realistic elements instead are recomposed with narrative effectiveness. It benefits from Roberta Lazzeri's magnificent painted scenes and architectural elements and Gianna Poli's imaginative and eloquent costumes. Lighting is by Vincenzo Apicella, shot by Valerio Tiberi. Underlining the fairy tale features also are the dancing fairies, thanks to Manu Lalli, the shower of bright stars and the pumpkin that will turn into a carriage to take Angelina to the party where she will meet the prince. In Rossini's fairy tale, the stepmother is replaced by the hilarious Don Magnifico, “intendente dei bicchier e presidente al vendemmiar”; Cinderella does not lose her slipper, but it is the cunning Alidoro who organizes the party that will bring her to meet the prince, staging a false accident to allow her to be recognized. The happy ending is assured, with a hint of mischief, by the new bride who, turning to her stepfather and stepsisters, sings “it will be my revenge their forgiveness.”
Conductor Gianluca Capuano, winner of the Abbiati Prize for Best Conductor of 2022, conducted in 2017 during the 80th Maggio Festival, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Idomeneo directed by Damiano Michieletto staged at the Teatro Manzoni in Pistoia and more recently, in October 2022, Georg Friedrich Händel's Alcina, again directed by Michieletto and on the podium of “Les Musiciens du Prince” with Cecilia Bartoli as protagonist, he now returns to the Maggio trying his hand at Rossini and Cinderella, a composer and opera very congenial to him and which he has directed frequently in his career.
In the cast, Teresa Iervolino one of the most important mezzo-sopranos on the international scene and one of the most acclaimed and appreciated voices in the bel canto repertoire, who already took on the role of Angelina in the 2018 edition, returns as the protagonist; Iervolino is also soon expected in a concert singing on the bill next Sept. 29 with the Orchestra del Maggio conducted by Matteo Permeggiani. The cast then lines up Patrick Kabongo (Don Ramiro) a tenor who took his first steps at the Accademia del Maggio and is now engaged in an important career all on the rise; William Hernandez gives voice to the verve and likability of Dandini, also “churned out” from the Accademia. The celebrated baritone, considered a true reference for this part, Marco Filippo Romano (already in the 2017 cast) plays Don Magnifico and was most recently Don Pasquale in Jonathan Miller's allestimendo of Donizetti's opera last March 2024. Angelina's two sour, exuberant and mischievous stepsisters are Maria Laura Iacobellis who plays Clorinda and Aleksandra Meteleva, now among the Academy's “resident” talents supporting the part of Thisbe. Bass-baritone Matteo D'Apolito is Alidoro the undoubted driving force - deus ex machina in place of the fairy - of Rossini's story.
Director's Notes, by Manu Lalli
Jan. 25, 1817, Rome, master Rossini's La Cenerentola makes its debut at the Teatro Valle. Gioachino at that time is at the height of his career, hailed throughout Europe, loved by women and in demand in bourgeois salons; everyone sings his music, everyone wants his operas. He moves between Naples, Rome, Venice, Milan. He has inexhaustible energy, creative vivacity and boundless genius. He has become in a very short time, and at only 25 years of age, one of the world's most florid and rapid composers. Indeed, it is “legend” (a legend that Rossini himself never bothered to disprove) that La Cenerentola was written in only 30 days! A month to write perhaps his most popular comic opera!!! But what is the reason for all this popularity? And why did Rossini specifically write La Cenerentola in Rome? Stendhal and Byron claimed that opera was “Italian opium” and that Italians, unable to create novels, as in other countries of Europe, because of censorship and repression, could only devote themselves to music. But perhaps they were mistaken: opera just like the novel (from which it often found inspiration) sowed ideas of redemption, criticized, accused, infected the youth with the desire for freedom, made the powerful ridiculous, banal the noble titles and the mannerisms of the new bourgeoisie. Rossini chose Cenerentola along with Ferretti because church authorities had censored the libretto of the opera he was to write. But he does not give up using music as usual as a diversion, hiding within the notes themes that are anything but light, which the story from which the opera takes its inspiration would suggest. Cinderella, in fact, is certainly a fairy tale (and in this version the narrative suggestions of the classic fairy tale, are maintained almost in full, from the fairy, to the pumpkin), but it is also much more. Rossini writes as a man of his time, and what he writes, though without a declared edifying intention, responds to the common feeling of the time in which the artist lives and works. It is the story of the desire for social redemption that so much at that moment in history Italy is experiencing. A desire for freedom, but more so for the claiming of rights, which throughout the country, as in the home of the evil Baron, Angelina's stepfather, have been repressed by stupidity and ignorance. The wicked sisters and the dreadful Don Magnifico (who is hilarious precisely because of his immense stupidity) are petty, uncivilized, ignorant, tearing pages out of the books Cinderella keeps from her mother's library, books from a past of letters and poetry. Once there was a king just like in Collodi's Pinocchio is the first word Cinderella says at the beginning of the play. Her dreams, her expectations, her goodness, are fueled by books, fairy tales, and poetry. The fairies, who led by Alidoro, the true deus ex machina of the subject, help her with their magic, will disappear from her life when she stops believing in them. The marriage she obtains, selfless and based on love, is the fruit of her goodness and intelligence and will finally make her an adult. Entering the “reality principle” causes the magic to disappear, and it is only then that Cinderella realizes that it was not the presence of the fairy that made her free and loved, but her goodness, virtue, and the not taken for granted, and never instinctive, ability to forgive.