Verdi: Il Corsaro [Blu-ray]

A Gem
This was shot over two performances in Busseto, in October 2008. Teatro Verdi in Busseto is a small but beautiful building inside the Pallavicino castle. This staging was captured on a Dynamic DVD when it played in Parma in 2004. It's a simple, traditional and beautiful staging that was scaled down for Busseto from Parma's much larger house (1200 seats in Parma vs. Busseto's 300). They could fit only 27 Parma orchestra players into the Busseto pit.

Director Lamberto Puggelli's staging employs a dramatically effective system to outline the action and convey a sense of time and space. The single set is a deck of a ship with sails, ropes and masts going up and down for scene changes. Costumes are rich and colorful. There is a thrilling battle scene between the pirates and the Turks. The staging and lighting are replete with wonderful and ingenious touches.

The four leads were relatively young and unknown singers at the time. They are all very good in every aspect,...

Well Done!!
Ah, gentle reader, what can one say about Il Corsaro? That it, along with Alzira are considered the bottom of the Verdi barrel? That, as Wiliam Berger ("Verdi With a Vengeance") notes, "If one could assemble the proper cast to perform Corsaro properly, one wouldn't. One would produce Trovatore instead"? Perhaps, but Verdi at his least best is still mighty fine music, and this performance is convincing evidence that Corsaro is worth experiencing.

This disc presents four principal singers with whom I am totally unfamiliar, but I hope to hear more from them. (If the opera gods are just, we should, but experience shows them to be as capricious as were their Greek anticedents, else why no more Met HD DVDs? But I am off topic ...)

The tenor role of Corrado has been described (Berger) as written for a "heroic voice". To me, Bruno Ribeiro is more of a spinto, but he executes the role, with all its fiendish tessatura, flawlessly. He would be an ideal Alfredo or Duke of...

Verdi's step-child
Il Corsaro is the step-child in the Verdi canon of operas. I was completed to fulfill a contract obligation to the publisher Lucca who was about to sue Verdi for not fulfilling a contract previously agreed to. There were angry words exchanged. After receiving it Lucca farmed it out to a back-water opera house in Trieste. Verdi did not attend the premiere and the audience did not like the opera. Thereafter it had only a few performances and disappeared from view.
Even the Tutto Verdi series from the Teatro Regio di Parma produced this opera on the tiny stage of the Teatro Verdi in Busseto Verdi's home town. The theatre in Parma has a capacity of 1200 but in Busseto it's only 300 and the stage is miniscule. And who sang the roles? All newcomers to the operatic stage but on the whole they did quite well. And of course the downsized orchestra and chorus of Parma did very well.
The Corrado (Conrad in Byron's long long narrative poem) of Bruno Ribiero was quite exciting. He is...

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