Est 1923

Rossini Armida

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Gioachino Rossini

Genre:

Opera

Label: Sony Classical

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 174

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: S3K58968

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Armida Gioachino Rossini, Composer
Bologna Teatro Comunale Chorus
Bologna Teatro Comunale Orchestra
Bruce Fowler, Carlo, Tenor
Carlo Bosi, Eustazio, Tenor
Daniele Gatti, Conductor
Donald Kaasch, Goffredo, Tenor
Gioachino Rossini, Composer
Gregory Kunde, Rinaldo, Tenor
Ildebrando d' Arcangelo, Idraote, Baritone
Iorio Zennaro, Ubaldo, Tenor
Jeffrey Francis, Gernando, Tenor
Renée Fleming, Armida, Soprano
Sergei Zadvorny, Astarotte, Bass
Rossini's Armida has had a chequered stage history in recent years, and its run of bad luck looked set to continue in 1993 when Anna Caterina Antonacci pulled out of Luca Ronconi's new Pesaro Festival production. Help was to hand, however, in the shape of the vocally alluring and alluringly beautiful American soprano Renee Fleming. More Mae West, perhaps, than Maria Callas (a fleetingly successful Armida of the 1950s), but very fine.
This new Sony Classical set is taken from performances recorded live in Pesaro's beautiful small Teatro Rossini during the 1993 run. As a memento of Fleming's performance it is highly collectable, though I would advise anyone to think long and hard before preferring the new set to the excellent studio recording made in 1991 by Europa Musica under the stylish direction of Claudio Scimone.
On the face of it, the new set, which uses the Critical Edition prepared by Charles S. and Patricia B. Brauner, has the better, fuller text. After all, it runs to three CDs, rather than two, and lasts 20 minutes longer. In practice, the Sony set spreads itself to three CDs for largely extraneous reasons—Daniele Gatti's sometimes sluggish, over-romanticized conducting, frequent applause, and the various intrusions and delays you are likely to meet in a theatre taping as editorially 'raw' as this.
One of the problems with a live, as opposed to studio or video, version of Armida is that it is a work rich in spectacle—the ballet sequence at the end of Act 2, for instance. Apparently, this was rather shocking in the theatre. Opera critic Elizabeth Forbes found much of it verging on the ''obscene'', ''downright offensive'', ''Berlin of The Blue Angel period when SM was no doubt PC''. On record, the sequence, dully conducted, is merely annoying, the music endlessly interrupted by bumps and shuffles which suggest, not so much The Blue Angel, as grandma in the attic doing a bit of tidying.
Nor is the Sony cast as generally impressive as Europa Musica's. Scimone's Cecilia Gasdia is not the raunchiest of Armidas, but she is a skilled Rossinian and sings well; and there is unusually strong support from the likes of Chris Merritt, Bruce Ford, William Matteuzzi, Ferruccio Furlanetto and—last but not least—the ever-stylish I Solisti Veneti. It is a set that would still be my first choice by some distance.'

Rossini Armida

Armida

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