Rossini: Mosè in Egitto – Abbado

Somewhere in the vast, echoing bowl of the Arena Adriatica, a suicide vest and a coloratura cadenza occupy the same square foot of stage space, and Rossini — poor, canny, box-office-minded Rossini — is left to fend for himself.

That is the fundamental problem with this document, and I use the word “document” advisedly, because as an experience of Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto it is compromised almost past the point of recommendation, however much one respects the archaeology involved. What we have is the composer’s original Naples version, premiered at the Teatro San Carlo in 1818 and touched up the following year — not the grander, more famous Paris remake of 1827 that gave the world “Dal tuo stellato soglio” in its more familiar guise and that Graham Vick himself had already staged at Pesaro back in 1997. Fourteen years on, Vick returned to the leaner original with a director’s hunger for relevance that, frankly, swallows the piece whole.

Let me be plain about what Rossini actually wrote, because it gets lost. This is an azione tragico-sacra — a genre Naples audiences understood as something between opera and oratorio, Lenten entertainment with the trappings of biblical spectacle, full of long-breathed choral writing and a harmonic language still rooted in the world of Rossini’s opera seria rather than the sleeker, more athletic vocal writing he’d perfect a decade later. The famous prayer scene, the plague choruses, the parting of the Red Sea handled (originally) with a modesty that scandalized nobody until a nervous printer’s error turned it into legend — none of this asks to be relocated to a bombed-out parking structure with Israeli and Palestinian extras milling through the stalls in blood-soaked shirts, waving photographs of the dead.

I don’t say this from squeamishness about political stagings. Regietheater has given us wonders — Herheim’s Parsifal, Warlikowski’s Iphigénie. But those productions found a dramaturgical logic inside the score. Vick’s Moses-as-bin-Laden concept, arresting for about four minutes, curdles fast into didacticism, and by the time the chorus is scattered across multiple levels of a set that looks like a cross between a Gaza checkpoint and a shopping mall under construction, the ear has given up trying to locate the music at all. There is no overture to ease us in — Vick cuts straight to spectacle — and the cameras, doing their best with a live disc made before an audience of thousands, can’t decide whether to follow the singers or the surrounding chaos. Neither, most nights, can we.

Which is a shame, because there is real singing here fighting for oxygen. Riccardo Zanellato’s Mosè has the requisite gravity — a dark, grainy bass with enough weight in the lower register to suggest authority, even swaddled in keffiyeh and combat webbing that undercut every ounce of dignity he’s trying to project vocally. Alex Esposito’s Faraone is the more interesting assumption dramatically, a study in vacillating menace, and his voice has the flexibility Rossini’s bel canto lines demand — quick, clean divisions, a genuine trill, though the top occasionally thins under pressure, as it will in a house this size with amplification doing who knows what to the balance. Olga Senderskaya’s Amaltea brings a bright, somewhat steely soprano to music that wants more Bellinian softness in the middle voice; she’s accurate, not ravishing.

The choral singing, it must be said, has real fervor — Rossini’s massed prayer episodes, indebted more to the Neapolitan sacred tradition than to anything operatic Vienna or Paris knew at the time, come off with genuine weight, even filtered through a sound design meant for a stadium built to hold eleven thousand people rather than a chamber-scaled tragico-sacra. But fervor is not the same as intelligibility, and too often the massed voices dissolve into stadium reverb, that peculiarly modern acoustic fog where consonants go to die.

Anyone wanting to encounter this rarely heard 1818–19 version properly should look instead to the studio and concert recordings that have surfaced from Naples-tradition specialists over the years, imperfect as some of them are — at least there the listener can hear Rossini’s actual dramaturgy, the plague choruses building without a subtext screaming for attention behind them. This Pesaro document has undeniable historical value: it corrects the popular assumption that “Mosè” always means the Paris revision, and it preserves a real curiosity of the repertoire on film. But as an experience of the opera itself, distraction wins. Vick has made his Mosè “notable.” He has not, alas, made it Rossini’s.