A comical ‘feel-good’ performance not to be missed!

From ingenious disguises to secret dates; the clichés of love are presented with a twist in the double bill La scala di seta / Il signor Bruschino by bel canto grandmaster Gioacchino Rossini. In these two operas the young Rossini first showed his grandiose romantic style. He composed his witty, energetic music on the comic stories of Giuseppe Maria Foppa.

Marcos Darbyshire directs the two one-act plays and provides them with the necessary contemporary jokes. “A lot of old comic elements are quite sexist and stereotypical. But humor is constantly changing and being reinvented all the time. Especially in recent years there has been a big change in comedy. Many things that we thought were funny twenty or even ten years ago are now considered passé. I think opera should reflect that shift, also in the way we make comedy.”

In La scala di seta, Dorvil is secretly married to Giulia. Every evening he quietly climbs a silk ladder (scala di seta) to see his bride. But Giulia’s guardian has other ideas for her future and tries to marry her off to Blansac. All this creates comic scenes in which love wins.

In Il signor Bruschino, Florville tries with cunning schemes to get permission to marry his beloved Sofia and not Mr. Bruschino junior, who has Sofia’s guardian in mind as a marriage partner. But will he succeed?

Although all the secret loves and devious schemes in both one-act plays cause a lot of chaos and laughable commotion, everyone eventually declares love to the right person. This also applies to Darbyshire: ‘for me, these operas are a kind of love letter to Rossini himself… The composer created real gems, and that at the age of twenty’.