La Cenerentola

Scottish Opera’s new production of Rossini’s Cenerentola, which is being shared with Strasbourg, received such glum reviews, especially from The Times, that it brought memories flooding back of the famous old Edinburgh Festival production staged at the King’s Theatre during Peter Diamand’s reign as Festival director. With Teresa Berganza, the brightest star in the Diamand firmament, as Cinderella, it marked one of the first appearances of Diamand’s own Festival opera company, in a  striking black-and-white production by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle that was eventually taken to La Scala,  Milan.

Those were the days, my friends, which we thought would never end. It was not that the production was the greatest imaginable - it had its characteristic Ponnelle flaws - but  it was staged with such style, wit, polish, and irresistible zest that it stuck in the memory. The cast was classy, and not just dependent on a single singer. Claudio Abbado, on his way to becoming the most masterly Rossinian of his period, conducted. The Scottish Opera Chorus, which then still existed and knew how to show its paces, provided dapper support.

By the time the show reached La Scala, it had been slightly modified, but not to its detriment. The chorus’s monochrome  costumes had changed to red. Berganza was succeed by the similarly gifted Frederika von Stade. But  the gloriously spindly Paolo Montarsolo was still the tetchy Don Magnifico and Francisco Araiza and Claudio Desderi were the brilliant Ramiro and Dandini.

Happily the Scala version  dated fron a time when internationally celebrated performances could go straight on to DVD, which was why I found myself watching it, with renewed pleasure, a week or two ago. Abaddo’s conducting was seductively spruce, though it was sad that there was not a glimpse of him on screen.  The Italian articulation was as zippy  as could be. Though Von Stade struck me as not quite so haunting as Berganza, she sang exquisitely. And Montarsolo was a wonderful old rascal, even better than Ian Wallace in Glyndebourne days under Vittorio Gui’s conductorship. The way that DVD keeps fine productions of yesteryear alive is one of the miracles of opera.

A pity this did not happen when Scottish Opera staged Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers at the Edinburgh Festival in  the 1970’s or when Janet Baker sang in the Trojans.
1 December 2014