Rossini finished La Cenerentola in three weeks. Three weeks. That fact never loses its power to astonish, and it explains both the opera’s irresistible momentum and its occasional corners cut — the borrowed overture pilfered from La gazzetta, the recitatives farmed out to a local Roman hack named Luca Angolini. What it doesn’t explain is how something assembled in such desperate haste became one of the most purely delightful comic operas ever written, second in the Rossini canon only to Il Barbiere di Siviglia and arguably more humane than that masterpiece, which can feel cold when it isn’t being brilliantly cruel.
The story behind the story is worth knowing. Papal censors in Rome rejected Ferretti’s original libretto practically on Rossini’s arrival in December 1816, and a late-night scramble produced the decision to set a Cinderella tale — but not Perrault’s, with its pumpkins and glass slipper and fairy godmother. What they borrowed from, shamelessly, was Pavesi’s Agatina, a La Scala production from 1814. The magic gets rationalized away. Virtue replaces the slipper. The result is at once more morally earnest and funnier than the fairy tale.
Paul Curran’s production, which started life in Naples in 2004, plants all this in 1912. That’s a choice with consequences — and not all of them happy ones. The Edwardian period does give designer Pasquale Grossi’s sets a certain chic legibility, and Zaira De Vincentiis’s costumes press the social-class subtext that Curran clearly wants to foreground. Fair enough: the opera has always been about humiliation and grace under duress, and the Edwardian moment, just before the old hierarchies got blown apart, sharpens that reading. But the supernatural strain — already thin in Ferretti’s libretto — gets nearly squeezed to nothing. Alidoro’s transformation of Angiolina is managed with what can only be described as a winged hat descending from the flies. Charming, in a faintly desperate way. The blind-man disguise that precedes it convinces nobody.
Yet Curran keeps things moving — and this matters more in Rossini than in almost any other composer, where a production that dawdles turns fizz into flat water. Renato Palumbo drives the score with genuine rhythmic intelligence, understanding that Rossini’s comedy lives in the pulse, in the spring of the accompaniment, in the precise calibration of accelerandi that feel inevitable rather than rushed.
Sonia Ganassi is the Cenerentola, and she is — on balance — very good indeed, though “very good” in this role requires something close to miraculous. The great mezzo coloratura tradition for this part runs through Conchita Supervia’s magisterial 1932 recordings, through Teresa Berganza’s celebrated accounts with Abbado and Gui, through Frederica von Stade’s luminous 1977 Abbado release for DG, which remains the standard. Ganassi doesn’t displace any of them. Her voice is warm and technically secure, her ornaments tidy, her dramatic instincts sound. What she lacks, at least here, is the last degree of expressive abandon in “Nacqui all’affanno” — that great rondo finale in which Angiolina’s forgiveness of her tormentors becomes a dizzying flood of vocal virtuosity. The runs are clean; the tears aren’t quite there.
Antonio Siragusa’s Don Ramiro is stylish and bright-toned, a proper Rossini tenor who negotiates the treacherous tessitura without evident strain. Marco Vinco brings genuine bass authority to Dandini — a role that can tip into mere buffoonery but works best when grounded in something like real weight. The confusion of identity between prince and servant, which is the opera’s central comic mechanism, requires exactly that grounding.
Alfonso Antoniozzi’s Don Magnifico — the stepfather, the comic villain — is, from what can be gathered, well-realized, though the updated setting puts some pressure on his physical business. The Edwardian suits don’t quite free him to be as broadly absurd as the role invites.
None of this is negligible. Much of it is genuinely pleasurable. But La Cenerentola at its best should feel like champagne uncorked — the whole thing spraying upward and outward with barely contained energy. This production and this cast offer something a little more considered, a little more managed. Which is, in the end, Rossini’s most damning context: the competition is too brilliant, and the bar was set by a man who himself refused to settle for merely good.
