On my annual pilgrimage to the birthplace of Rossini for the world-famous Rossini Opera Festival, I arrive with the same sense of excitement. I often wish life could be more like the opera. The art form remains massively underrated by many Britons, who imagine it as elitist and distant. In reality, opera is beauty, drama and pure distilled emotion, helping us explore and understand the literal and earthly through the artistic and transcendent.
At its silliest it is farce, comedy of manners and sexual misbehaviour. At its grandest it embraces the sweep of civilisational history: conquest, national survival, kingdoms, empires and the collision of different worlds. Opera achieves this through extremes. The devotion of lovers is absolute. The betrayal of thieves and cheats is complete. The tyranny of the powerful is relentless. Through the binary, the archetypal and the exemplary, it gives us portraits of emotion and human behaviour that illuminate precisely because they move beyond everyday realism. Then music transforms those ideas into something physical. You do not simply understand the emotion, you feel it.
I was particularly excited by this year’s inclusion of Rossini’s Le Siège de Corinthe, one of his great but less frequently performed works. The opera takes the Ottoman siege of Corinth and transforms it into a drama of conquest, resistance, sacrifice and cultural survival. What could feel more relevant in contemporary Europe, where questions of identity, Islamic migration, tradition and cultural continuity have returned to the centre of political debate?
This opera belongs to the same fascinating strand of Rossini’s work that repeatedly explores encounters between Europe and the Muslim Mediterranean. The historical setting is specific, yet Rossini uses it to create something larger: a meditation on identity, power, faith and the destruction caused when one civilisation overwhelms another. Opera was about to work its magic of artistic enlightenment on one of my daily topics of professional and personal concern.
Except, in the hands of Director David Livermore, it decisively was not. His production was a clumsy, oafish massacre of Rossini’s work carried out by a man with the sensitivity of a blind porcupine attempting to make love to a Fabergé egg, while congratulating himself on his tenderness.
Livermore takes the original confrontation between Ottoman conquerors and Christian Greeks and replaces it with a sloppy allegory about modern consumerism, technology, environmental destruction and superficiality. The Greeks inhabit a strange artificial classical world of robes, broken statues and fragments of temples. The Ottomans disappear as Ottomans. They become modern figures in white suits, carrying rubbish prop mobile phones, taking selfies and representing a shallow technological culture.
It’s all so tired: the concept has the stale air of someone arriving late to the fashionable causes of five years ago and mistaking them for profound insight. It feels like a sixth-form drama A-level production, complete with the obligatory symbols, the obvious moral lesson and the confidence of someone convinced they have uncovered a truth nobody else has noticed. But even Greta has moved on from sea turtles and plastic to Free Palestine and Irish antisemite rap.
The singers and orchestra deserved better. Vasilisa Berzhanskaya’s Pamyra was the triumph of the evening, a performance of remarkable scale, richness and delicacy. She combined dramatic authority with exquisite control of Rossini’s demanding vocal writing. Maxim Mironov brought his extensive Rossini experience to Néoclès with elegance and stylistic assurance. Adrian Sâmpetrean gave Mahomet II the necessary authority and weight, while Simón Orfila and Matteo Roma contributed strongly. Carlo Rizzi conducted with discipline and grandeur, allowing the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna to reveal the power and beauty of Rossini’s score despite having to compete with the constant distractions around it.
And there are plenty of clichéd distractions. Rubbish bags appear everywhere. There is an overturned shopping trolley (how profound!), plastic detritus floating in the water, archaeological fragments made of polystyrene, two pointlessly spinning lumps of scaffolding and scenery, and endless visual noise. At the centre of the stage sits an obnoxious video-wall fresh out of a shopping mall, surrounded by mirrored walls, showing endless repeating loops of 1990s-style computer screensavers zooming in and out of a rubbish render of a gold baroque picture frame: badly rendered classical architecture, strange artificial moving water and clouds, and dated Midjourney-era AI imagery. Someone should at least introduce him to Seedance.
Livermore’s clumsy attempted critique of modernity becomes a display of his own modern superficiality, drowning out Rossini’s classical elegance with the very kind of empty spectacle the production claims to oppose. It is a shallow parade of recently fashionable causes that most of us have already seen through, coupled with obvious symbols and dated technological effects imposed upon a work whose beauty and complexity require no such ‘assistance’. The tragedy is that Le Siège de Corinthe has extraordinary dramatic foundations. It is a work about invasion, sacrifice, collective identity and the human consequences of conquest – all starkly relevant to today’s world.
Rossini’s fascination with the Islamic world is one of the reasons his work remains so interesting. Alongside the extraordinary musical invention, the heavenly colouratura and the Olympic-level skill required from the finest Rossini singers, there is a repeated exploration of encounters between European and Muslim worlds. Last year’s festival included L’italiana in Algeri, in which the supposedly powerful Mustafa is defeated by Italian intelligence and wit. Il turco in Italia plays with cultural fascination and misunderstanding. Maometto II and Le Siège de Corinthe confront the darker realities of conquest, culture and conflict.
For those of us constantly immersed in the gloom and disaster of the social and political tides of our time, opera offers another way of understanding the world. It allows us to move beyond the immediate noise and anxiety of events and grasp the deeper human realities beneath them, transforming the literal into something artistic, symbolic and poetic. This was a missed opportunity, but at least the other two major productions at the festival – both lighter in theme – demonstrated this beautifully.
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s staging of L’occasione fa il ladro, revived by Sonja Frisell, remains a masterpiece of theatrical economy. Conceived in 1987, it feels entirely alive because every element grows from Rossini’s comedy. The visible stage machinery and playful exposure of theatrical artifice become part of the joke itself. Dave Monaco was the vocal standout, elegant and technically excellent, while Alessandro Bonato brought precision and buoyancy to the score.
Damiano Michieletto’s La scala di seta also showed how a modern production can age with extraordinary freshness. The entire staging is built around the idea of the apartment as a comic machine. During the overture, a blueprint of Giulia’s flat is gradually assembled into a real modern home, a visual reflection of the way Rossini himself constructs the opera’s intricate world of secret lovers, misunderstandings, entrances and concealed intentions. The enormous mirror above the stage allows the audience to see the whole mechanism at once: who is hiding, who is approaching, who knows what and who remains completely unaware. The characters experience only fragments of the space around them, while we see the full architecture of the comedy. In that sense, the production captures something essential about Rossini’s music itself, where several competing perspectives can unfold simultaneously yet remain part of a perfectly controlled structure. Paolo Bordogna was superb as Germano, combining comic brilliance with excellent Rossini singing, and Hasmik Torosyan brought charm and flexibility to Giulia.
The lesson of this year’s festival was clear. Great opera direction begins with listening. The strongest productions reveal what is already there. The weakest compete with it.
Rossini’s genius lies in his ability to turn human experience into something larger, sharper and more beautiful than ordinary life. In uncertain times, that remains one of opera’s greatest gifts: a place where history, emotion and human nature can still be understood in their fullest form.
The Rossini Opera Festival is on until August 23
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