Rossini rarity

Matilde di Shabran
Royal Opera House

Aida
English National Opera

Iolanta
Royal Festival Hall

Matilde di Shabran is one of Rossini’s least performed operas, and having seen the Royal Opera’s production, which derives from the Pesaro festival of 2004, I understand why. Broadly speaking, it is a comedy without jokes or other humour, and in well over three hours of music there is not a single memorable tune, quite a feat for this composer. It was written in a great hurry, of course, and for its second production Rossini provided music that had for the first been written by a kind friend but undistinguished composer, Pacini. The plot concerns the wearing down of a misogynist by the title character; and there are several other important roles, ranging from the misogynist’s physician to an itinerant poet, and a Countess who is also wooing Corradino, the morose central character.

Apologists for the work tend to say that it breaks new ground, with a mixture of the near-farcical and the fairly serious. That seems to me to be special pleading, all the more when it is claimed that Act I needs to be longer than any Wagner act to accommodate the variety of moods. The fact is that the plot is so badly organised that there is a plethora of characters wandering round, and, even granted its generous length, some are developed so scantily that it is impossible to take any interest in them. That applies most damagingly to the Countess, sung rather well by Enkelejda Shkosa, but she had so little material to apply her gifts to that it was hard to tell. Contrariwise, the itinerant poet is verbose, and was sung distressingly badly by Alfonso Antoniozzi. There was quite a quantity of odd singing, much of it provided by Vesselina Kasarova, once a favourite of mine.