Rossini: Le Siège de Corinthe – Tingaud

Rossini never liked throwing anything away, and Le Siège de Corinthe is the proof: a wholesale act of operatic recycling so thorough it amounts to a second composition. The question any recording has to answer is whether the Paris retrofit actually improves on Maometto II, the opera Naples heard in 1820 and promptly failed to understand. My answer, after much relistening, is: sometimes gloriously, sometimes not.

Context matters here, so bear with me. Naples in 1820 gave Rossini resources no other Italian house could match: a permanent orchestra, a trained chorus, and Barbaja’s stable of virtuosi willing to sing whatever lunacies he wrote for them. Freed from the provincial demand for cheap crescendos and stock cabalettas, he produced in Maometto II something genuinely strange, an opera seria without a conventional love-triangle resolution, ending not in reconciliation but in the heroine’s suicide over her father’s body. Parisian taste, five years on, required grander spectacle, ballet, a chorus with actual dramatic weight, and vindication of French nationalist feeling in the wake of the Greek War of Independence, which was very much in the newspapers. So Rossini chopped, transposed, added a ballet, rewrote the finale, and renamed the Turkish conqueror’s victims Greeks instead of Venetians. The bones of Maometto II are still there under the French skin. You can feel them.

This Naxos release, taken from a Bad Wildbad performance, gives us the piece more or less complete, which is itself an achievement given the score’s tangled performance history and the general public indifference to anything Rossini wrote that isn’t Barbiere or Guillaume Tell.

Lorenzo Regazzo’s Mahomet is the strongest element on these discs, and by some distance. He has the low notes, not a given in this repertoire, where basses are routinely asked to sing what feels like baritone tessitura stretched downward by Rossini’s taste for the sepulchral, and more importantly he has the swagger. There’s menace in the phrasing of his big entrance aria, something genuinely unsettling rather than merely villainous, and he never resorts to barking to make the character’s authority felt. Few recorded Mahomets have managed that balance. This one does.

Majella Cullagh’s Pamyra is more variable. The voice is attractive, the coloratura mostly clean, but there’s a thinness in the middle register that becomes audible whenever Rossini asks for real heft, and he asks often, because Pamyra is required to be simultaneously a Rossinian heroine of filigree ornament and a tragic figure of Gluckian stature. Cullagh manages the ornament. The stature is intermittent. Her Act III scene, the prayer interrupted by the approaching Turkish army, wants a sound with more core to it, more sheer vocal body to carry over the chorus and brass. She sings it musically. She does not quite make your hair stand up, and in this music somebody should.

Marc Sala’s Cléomène is serviceable, a touch effortful at the top, never embarrassing.

The Bad Wildbad orchestra plays with evident commitment though not always complete polish; the horns have an off moment or two in the overture’s introduction, forgivable in a live festival album, less so on repeated listening. Still, the engineering is warm and reasonably detailed, and the chorus comes through with real presence. You can hear individual voices inside the choral mass during the big Act I ensemble.

Compared with what else is available, including the Opera Rara and Naples-based accounts that restore the original ending, this Siège de Corinthe fills a gap rather than definitively closing it. It is worth owning for Regazzo alone, and for the chance to hear how thoroughly Rossini could rethink his own material without actually discarding it. Not a first choice if you want the opera in one version only. An indispensable document, all the same, for anyone trying to understand how a composer this resourceful could inhabit two operatic cultures at once, and nearly convince both of them it was native work.