Hello, I've recently joined the list, and I'm looking for advice on activities in the East Tuscany / Marches / North Umbria area during the last week of July and the first two weeks of August 2007.
My wife, a Bologna native, and I have recently finished renovating our summer house in Sestino, in the easternmost point of Tuscany.
We are looking for activities for our first visit to the house that won't involve spending all of our time buying appliances or hiring a team of Albanians to haul furniture up our driveway on a tractor.
We are interested in attending the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro in mid-August. http://www.rossinioperafestival.it/ Has anyone attended in the past? What's your opinion? Any advice?
Welcome to the messageboard! I've never been myself, but we have friends in Cagli who go every year, and speak highly of it. The festival certainly gets some good singers - I see they have Juan Diego Florez again this year - and it's certainly a chance to see some Rossini rarities (I've certainly never heard of Edipo a Colono, or Le Nozze di Teti e di Peleo, in a double bill this year).
Macerata is a fair bit further away from you, but we have been to the extraordinary open-air arena there, and were pleasantly surprised by the excellent acoustics, and a good production (of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, a few years ago) which made imaginative use of the hugely wide stage area. Their 2007 programme is here.
Jonathan
Posts: 2945 | Location: Stroud, UK | Registered: 18 November 2001
Hi Andrew and welcome to ST! I'm really useless as a Opera critic... but I had some guests staying at my place and going to the Rossini Opera Festival and they were generally quite happy with what they saw. I see that this year they are using only the Rossini Theatre and the BPA Palas, they both have quite good acoustics as far as I know (there was another theatre that they used years ago and that was BAD!). The Rossini Theatre is quite small so you might wish to book well in advance (but the Theatre itself is fascinating!). I hope that this helps a bit!
Jonathan, are you talking about Peter and Richard?
The Rossini Opera Festival is highly respected in opera circles as they have managed both to discover and perform unknown Rossini music in critical editions, and to develop and assemble cast of singers specializing in performing Rossini. Quality of performances is very high. I would say one of the top achievements in Italian opera performance during the last 20 years.
Their top performance was probably their 1984 resurrecting of Rossini's "Il viaggio a Reims", that was believed to be lost and not performed since 1825, with a stellar cast of a dozen opera stars conducted by Claudio Abbado.
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