Rossini - Le siège de Corinthe at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro

Auditorium Scavolini, Pesaro, Friday June 21 2026

Conductor: Carlo Rizzi. Production: Davide Livermore. Sets: Eleonora Peronetti, Paolo Gep Cucco, Davide Livermore. Video: D-Wok. Costumes: Gianluca Falaschi. Choreography: Erika Rombaldoni. Lighting: Nicolas Bovey. Mahomet II: Adrian Sâmpetrean. Cléomène: Matteo Roma. Pamyra: Vasilisa Berzhanskaya. Néoclès: Maxim Mironov. Hiéros: Simón Orfila. Adraste: Tianxuefei Sun. Omar: Giuseppe De Luca. Ismène: Anna-Doris Capitelli. Chorus of the Ventidio Basso theatre. Bologna Municipal Theatre Orchestra.

Photos: Amati Bacciardi

While I’ve no intention of teaching granny to suck eggs, I think any article about Le siège de Corinthe is bound to include at least something about the history - or vicissitudes, you might say - of the work. Those of you who already know all about Corinthian egg-sucking can just skip to the performance itself.

So (1)… Rossini’s Le siège de Corinthe premiered in Paris in October 1826 and to celebrate, the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro has just staged a new production, by Davide Livermore. For his first French opera, Rossini chose to draw on Maometto II, composed for Naples in 1820: it wasn’t known in Paris, and Rossini himself was particularly fond of what Philip Gossett goes so far as to call a ‘perfect’ neoclassical opera, so it made sense to recycle some of the material.

However, catering to Paris opera conventions meant not just translating the libretto into French, but rewriting the score: fleshing out the orchestra, simplifying the vocal style and adapting it to French declamation, adding choruses and ballets, changing voice types (the female alto Calbo becoming, for example, the tenor Néoclès) and reassigning arias or portions of arias in consequence…

In addition, in April 1826, i.e. just six months before the premiere of Le siège, the final siege of Missolonghi had ended in victory for the Turks and catastrophe for the Greeks. Inhabitants not massacred or choosing suicide by gunpowder over Ottoman defeat were carried off into slavery, and the city was burnt to ashes. European public opinion was already gripped by the unrest in Greece. Byron’s own The Siege of Corinth (inspired by the 1715 Ottoman massacre of the Venetian garrison in Corinth: no wonder we get confused) had been published in 1816. The news of his death in Missolonghi, in 1824, had caused a great stir, further stoking philhellenic sentiment.

The story of Turks v. Venetians in Maometto II thus became one of Turks v. Greeks in Le siège. Up to the last minute, the third and final act was remodelled as news from the war of independence continued to reach Paris. As a result, though the action is supposedly based on Mehmet II’s historic siege of Corinth in 1458, Le siège de Corinthe is deemed to be one of the most, perhaps the most topical of all operas.

There is no known autograph version of Le siège. The first orchestral score was printed by Eugène-Théodore Troupenas in Paris (he would also publish the first editions of Moïse, Le comte Ory and Guillaume Tell), and this still provided the basis for performances in Pesaro in 2000, to Philip Gossett's dismay. Demonstrating how quickly, in Rossini’s day, scores got hacked up and rearranged, Troupenas’s first edition is, according to Gossett, ‘a mess, with errors and inconsistencies, major confusions about the order and content of pieces, and dramaturgical absurdities.’ At the end, ‘the male Greek defenders of Corinth are all dead, yet they manage to sing from offstage “O patrie,” in a conclusion that merges incoherently several versions of the final measures.’ The 2000 staging didn’t help, but for more about that, read Gossett.

What he doesn’t mention, and probably didn’t know since Damien Colas’s critical edition of Le siège would only be heard in Pesaro in 2017, was that, as well as reconstructing the original architecture of the score, it would also restore nearly 500 bars that had already gone AWOL by the time Troupenas printed his first edition. Colas did all this by painstakingly piecing the score together line by line (‘from piccolo to double-bass, bar by bar’) from the individual orchestra and vocal parts.

As early as 1827, Italian translations of the opera began to circulate as L’assedio di Corinto, of a kind, typical of their times, that Colas calls ‘adaptations sauvages’ (haphazard adaptations) with numerous ‘bidouillages’ (tinkerings), ‘alterations of varying degrees - the removal of certain numbers and the insertion of others, not necessarily by the composer but by the often anonymous individuals in charge of each production: conductor, choirmaster, capo banda… not to mention the singers and their whims.’

Which brings us to the famous but oft-decried (by Gossett, for one, bitterly) diva-showpiece version of L’assedio featuring Beverly Sills under Thomas Schippers. This, says Colas, ‘bears little resemblance to the authentic siège de Corinthe’, with ‘here, excerpts from Maometto II, there passages from Le siège translated into Italian, and a breathtaking rondo aria, “Parmi vederlo, ahi misero” composed in 1828 for Giulia Grisi, slotted in between Pamira’s prayer and the tragic finale.’ The decision to switch Néoclès’ tenor part back to a breeches role for alto or mezzo, to allow Marilyn Horne and Shirley Verrett to dazzle audiences alongside Sills, resulted in numerous inconsistencies, even absurdities, in the patchwork score.  

Colas nevertheless concludes, philosophically, that this Schippers/Mickelson mishmash remains important. Thanks to ‘the splendour of the performance,’ it brought the work to the attention of a wide audience, contributing to the revival of Rossini’s opera seria output. But also, ‘it bears witness to that quaint business of cobbling together 19th-century scores, which, thankfully, is now on the wane.’ For bel canto fans, he writes, ‘it is a cult recording, in which Beverly Sills, with her legendary trill, showcases the very best of her artistry.’

The full plot of Le siège de Corinthe can of course be found online. In brief, Cléomène, the governor of Corinth, wants his daughter, Pamyra, to marry a Greek officer, Néoclès. She, of course, is already in love with someone else, who to her surprise, not ours, turns out to be Mahomet II. When, after much soul searching, she eventually turns him down, the latter finally attacks. As the Greek menfolk march off to defeat and enslavement or worse, she joins the women in choosing death over dishonour, and Corinth goes up in flames.

*****

Director, designer, singer, dancer, actor, scriptwriter and teacher Davide Livermore is a star of the Italian stage, director of Genoa’s Teatro Nazionale, and a Pesaro regular, but this was the first time I had seen a production by him. If this article is late, it’s partly because, after Pesaro, I was completing my journey to Naxos, where I’m writing now, but very much because I was at a loss for words to describe what I saw. 

Now I know I sometimes get told off for quoting from other people’s accounts, but while I muster my thoughts, I can’t resist pasting here a lively snippet from a review by Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Jewish Chronicle, who writes that Livermore’s staging is… ‘… a clumsy, oafish massacre of Rossini’s work carried out by a man with the sensitivity of a blind porcupine attempting to make love to a Fabergé egg, while congratulating himself on his tenderness.’

After much thought, I decided I’d start my own account by simply recycling what I wrote about Johannesburg Erath’s take on Ermione, also in Pesaro, in 2024. In a nutshell, ‘The production was exasperatingly cliché-ridden and over-busy.’ Livermore’s Le siège actually opens with a cliché: ‘Corinthe’ daubed in red at the end of a streak of blood across the black steel safety curtain. From that point on, it’s a perpetual guessing-game as to the director’s intentions; at no point does he seem interested in engaging with the tragedy of Corinth (or the implied one of Missolonghi) as such.

The curtain rises on giant crates of ancient artefacts wheeled about by scurrying dancers in Grecian tunics. So at first it looks like this might be a ‘museum’ production, or a ‘spoliation by invaders’ one, both familiar from various stagings of Giulio Cesare and other works over the years. Statues, including the Vénus de Milo, are unpacked, a tall chunk of ruin with twin Ionic columns slides in, and one big crate opens to reveal a glowing screen at its rear. This crate, a small stage-within-a-stage with its video backdrop, will be a permanent feature throughout the evening. The videos, by a multimedia design firm called D-Wok, look as if they’d asked AI to conjure up a Kitschy ideal vision of the ancient world - one reminiscent of postcards and trinkets peddled to tourists around the foot of the Athens Acropolis - by combining Lawrence Alma-Tadema with Thomas Kinkade. These images will glitch up in a slick of oily black to show temples, a throne room, sea views, etc, eventually the Parthenon atop a mountain of garbage, and Corinth in flames.

Le siège might be set in various relevant times and places: the time of Mehmet the Conqueror; the time the work premiered, and thus that of the Greek war of independence; in any modern or present-day context of conquest and occupation… Here, however, the Greeks are costumed (by Gianluca Falaschi) as cartoonish ancient Greeks with flowers in their hair, while the Ottomans seem, at first, to be inter-war gentleman archeologists, in beige linen three-piece suits, black ties and fedoras. Only their behaviour is anything but gentlemanly: these are swaggering, uncouth oafs, forever lighting up cigarettes (a directorial tic I’d already complained of after Ermione), laughing at the humiliation of the hapless Greeks and taking Instagram shots and selfies with their smartphones - yes, the inevitable smartphones, notwithstanding their ‘Howard Carter’ looks. Mahomet, in a white suit, relieves himself on arrival against a column, before lighting up and posing with his grinning gang for one of many selfies. He signals his virility by climbing up the scaffolding.

As the stage fills with variegated bags of rubbish, plastic waste bobs on the Aegean in the garish, gilt-framed videos behind, and Pamyra sings a lament seated on an upturned supermarket trolley, it emerges that the production is somehow a comment on the impact of uncouth modernity on ancient art and cultures, or, more simply, one on the disastrous effects of overtourism. It’s as if it has a life of its own, and the near-irrelevant opera is played out within it quite incidentally. As I wrote above, in no way does it address the classic tragic dilemma of affections and loyalties in times of war, invasion and occupation: with cardboard cut-out Greeks and an army of chain smoking louts in beige linen wielding toy swords and led by a spiv, how could it? It managed at once to trivialise ancient Greece, the Ottomans, the Muslim occupation and war of independence, Rossini’s heartfelt opera seria and by implication, in the special context of Le siège, the dreadful fate of Missolonghi.

And naturally, the reduction of the characters to silly caricatures undermines the efforts of the singers. It’s impossible to tell if their hammy, silent-film acting (the production also involves many ‘freeze-frame’ moments, tableaux vivants in which soloists and chorus strike corny heroic poses) is a result of their being left to their own devices by a director too busy orchestrating his technically-perfect conception, or of their being directed to do it.

Before I move on to the singing, though it isn’t the usual protocol, I’ll begin with the orchestra under Carlo Rizzi, as their contribution naturally had an impact on it. Rizzi is, I guess, a safe pair of hands, and conducted the score with vigour and impulse. But delicacy isn’t his thing. I’m particularly interested in the subtleties of Rossini’s orchestra, its skilfully-crafted, and in my view often neglected, inner workings. Rizzi’s relatively martial approach, never, it felt, dropping below forte, with a largish Bologna orchestra in the pit including the substantial lower brass added for Paris, produced what I’m sorry to admit I called a ‘galumphing’ effect when texting my first impressions to a friend. This made things harder for the singers.

Pamyra is, in the most considerate of circumstances, a punishing role, and in this production, she even has to mingle with the dancers and display conflicting emotions during the cute act-two ballets Rossini composed for the Opéra, here staged as a dream, or perhaps her inner turmoil. Vasilisa Berzhanskaya has an impressive voice, best, in its current state, in long, soft passages, where she can float ethereal pianissimi, in dramatic declamation, and soaring thrillingly over a full orchestra and chorus in rousing finales. She must surely be a great Médée, supposing she has the dramatic temperament for it (in this production, it is impossible to tell if her relative impassivity and corny gesturing are her own, or imposed deliberately by the director as part of his scheme). Her ‘nightingale’ days, supposing she had them, are, however, probably now, or will soon be, behind her - at any rate with Rizzi conducting the Bologna band. Her rapid runs, slightly soapy, disappeared under the decibels.

The two ‘Nourrit’ tenors (Louis Nourrit was the first Cléomène, while his son Adolphe sang Néoclès), Matteo Roma and Maxim Mironov, were nicely contrasted. Funnily, young Roma is practically at the start of his career, whereas Mironov is someone I first saw as Marzio in Mozart’s Mitridate 20 years ago (around the time all Facebook was gawping at his bare-chested Lindoro), yet here the younger singer, heavily made-up, grey-haired and whiskered, got to play the older part. Roma’s singing was as assertive as the staging allowed a paper cut-out to be, and interestingly complex in timbre. Perhaps end-of-series fatigue (I was there on the last night) was responsible for one or two strangled top notes; but as the orchestra was loud, they were barely noticeable. Perhaps the same fatigue explains the lack of éclat in Mironov’s top register too. Otherwise, his was probably the most classic Rossini singing of the evening, elegant if perhaps too light for a role composed for Adolphe Nourrit. Curiously and unfortunately, in his Grecian pleats and gold boots, he recalled Michael Palin in The Life of Brian (‘I have a vewy gweat fwiend in Wome called Biggus Dickus'). This limited his dramatic impact.

Bass Adrian Sâmpetrean (Mahomet) was announced sick but willing to soldier on. As is often the case, this didn’t show, at least to anyone not familiar with him, but it may have reduced his impact and the consistency of his singing at least to some extent. I’ve read he's a very interesting singer. Here he seemed a bit uneven and blustery, but in the circumstances it’s probably better not to try to judge. I’ll be glad to find his name in a future cast list and form a sounder opinion.

Experienced Simón Orfila was a strikingly resounding Hiéros, the rest of the supporting cast was adequate, or, in the case of Anna-Doris Capitelli, more than adequate, and the chorus was on form.

In a more respectful, less self-regarding production, rather than one that felt as if a limitless budget had been handed to a precocious student director too young to realise his astounding insights are tiresomely déja vu, and with subtler playing, this might have been a better evening of Rossini. But that sports-arena auditorium is spartan, the seats are painful, summer parking in Pesaro is a nightmare, and you can’t be sure your money will have been well spent. The Festival isn’t what it used to be - as one friend familiar with it joked, they should let people park in the empty seats - and I honestly wonder if I’ll bother to go back again. (1) The key sources for this introduction were Philip Gossett’s Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, plus an interview he gave about Maometto II, now on YouTube; musicologist Damien Colas’ De Maometto II (1820) au Siège de Corinthe (1826) : comment une pièce turque est devenue une tragédie grecque, in Orages magazine; six interviews with Colas (who made the critical edition of Le siège now used in Pesaro and elsewhere) published, to mark the work’s bicentenary, on the Première Loge website; and, inevitably, Wikipedia.

(An edited version of this post may be published on Parterre.com.)