Rossini: Tancredi DVD – Maria Pia Piscitelli , Ildebrando d’Arcangelo

Tancredi was the work on which Rossini’s reputation as a composer of tragic operas rested, just as L’Italiana in Algeri (“The Italian Girl in Algiers”) had been his first comic masterpiece. Inevitably, given the opera seria conventions within which he was working, it can seem terribly static nowadays–this is a work whose stage action consists almost exclusively of entrances and exits, and of characters emoting in various combinations–but when the emotions are as powerful as those here it hardly matters. The breeches part of Tancredi is one of Rossini’s most powerfully lyrical: Bernadette Manca de Nisa is especially moving in the famous aria “Di Tanti Palpiti”. The heroine Amenaide, wrongfully accused of treason, has the most to do emotionally, and Maria Raul is suitably touching, collapsing decorously to the floor as a way of conveying extremes of shame or incredulous hurt. Ildebrando D’Arcangelo does what he can with the stiff villain, Orbazzano. In some ways, the star of the performance is Raul Giménez in the unpromising role of Amenaide’s much-deceived father Argirio, combining authority with pain and making both highly musical. Throughout, Gianluigi Gelmetti’s intelligent conducting of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra makes the delicate sides of the scoring matter most:he has learned from original instrument performances how to bring out the plangency of Rossini’s woodwind writing.On the DVD: The DVD has no additional features except for subitles in Italian, French, German, English and Spanish and menus in French, Spanish, German and English. The sound is presented perfectly adequately but unexcitingly in PCMstereo and the picture ratio is 4:3. –Roz Kaveney