FULL DON PASQUALE Viterbo 2022 Gaetano Merone, Matteo Guerzé, Airi Sunada, Marco Puggioni
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Don Pasquale
- Composer: Donizetti Gaetano
- Libretto: Giovanni Ruffini Libretto Text, Libretto Index
- Venue & Opera Company: Teatro dell'Unione, Viterbo, Italy
- Recorded: March 20, 2022
- Type: Staged Opera Live
- Singers: Gaetano Merone, Matteo Guerzé, Airi Sunada, Marco Puggioni, Filippo Malvezzi
- Conductor: Fabrizio Bastianini
- Orchestra: Orchestra EtruriÆnsemble
- Chorus: Ensemble vocale “Il Contrappunto”
- Chorus Master: David Barrios
- Stage Director: Mariano Bauduin
- Stage Designer: Nicola Rubertelli
- Costume Designer: Marianna Carbone
- Lighting Designer: Luigi Della Monica
Information about the Recording
- Published by: Mariano Bauduin
- Date Published: 2023
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: nosubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
It has been adequately noted by the most prestigious musicologists that Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale represents an unprecedented example of a new style of post-Rossinian “Comic Opera”, and is positioned as an anticipator of Offenbach, Verdi’s Falstaff, and Gianni Schicchi’s Puccini. No longer just comedy, but important new dramaturgical elements: the individual drama of the old protagonist, no longer an old duped Pantalone, who still hopes to be able to wed an attractive and extremely young wife; the taste of a Boulevardier theater that scandalously touches on new themes such as adultery and divorce; a new musical drama attentive to changing tastes and fashions and which in the comic genre was ready to take action with respect to a new melodrama, which, starting from the second half of the nineteenth century,
The staging highlights the musical and dramaturgical elements which curiously refer to a cultural humus subsequent to Donizetti’s, in particular to the belle époque-end of the century climate of the works of Jacques Offenbach precisely, or of Hervé.
In this perspective, the aesthetic solutions of the staging are explained more clearly: from the point of view of the scenes, created by Nicola Rubertelli, the presence of an enormous rotating “machine” is evident which reveals a double style, on the one hand anchored to a late nineteenth century, and on the other a clear Futurist environment, two worlds and two eras clearly distant from Time, linguistic elements of architectural styles that put the accent on that dramaturgical element that runs through the story and the characters of “Don Pasquale”, or rather the anguish of Time; and again, the beautiful costumes by Marianna Carbone in harmony with this reading that wants to appear elegantly nineteenth-century for the character of Don Pasquale, or completely modern for the character of Norina who seems to have come out of the Great Gatsby; Finally, the interpretation often ironic to the point of surreal – especially for the characters of Doctor Malatesta and Notaro – who seem to refer to a world evoked by a fantastic dissonance between My Fair Lady and D’Annunzio’s aesthetics; a direction that is built on gestures and attitudes that refer to a new bourgeois society, a new melodramatic audience that was forgetting how we laughed, and how little we took ourselves seriously.
(Mariano Bauduin)