Milan.(In Reviews: from around the world: International - Moise et Pharaon)(Opera Review)

Rossini's Moise et Pharaon is one of the very few non-comic operas by Rossini to have remained consistently in the repertoire in Italy, but until very recently it was always heavily cut and performed in an unsatisfactory Italian translation. Six years ago, the Rossini Opera Festival staged a complete performance of the French original--first seen at the Paris Opera in 1827 and itself a reworking of the earlier Mose in Egitto--and now La Scala has followed suit with a highly successful season-opening production at the Teatro degli Arcimboldi (seen on December 16). Luca Ronconi's staging--similar to one he devised at the Paris Opera twenty years ago--created a bridge between the biblical story and the nineteenth-century rereading of it by organizing the action around two organs situated amid the dunes of the desert. (The set was designed by Gianni Quaranta.) Ronconi avoided, however, his customary ironic perspective, accepting the intensity of the Hebrews' faith on its own terms, and he managed the coups de theatre (the burning bush and Red Sea crossing) neatly, if hardly spectacularly. The set design did not leave much space for the ballet sequences, minimally choreographed by Micha van Hoecke, but the chorus, forced to the front of the stage, performed to magnificent effect, and the cast was one of the best one could hope for today.

Particularly outstanding were the young bass Erwin Schrott--who ...