Rossini: L’equivoco stravagante - Kurtheater Bad Wildbad (2018) [Blu-ray]

Rossini wrote L’equivoco stravagante (‘The Curious Misunderstanding’), his first full-length opera, when he was only 19 years old. As its title suggests, the plot of this dramma giocoso offers a panoply of absurdist stagecraft with one character being led to believe that the work’s heroine is in fact a castrato trying to avoid military service. Full of his trademark buffo humour, melodious and musically buoyant, the opera ran foul of the censors and was swiftly banned, which accounts for its rarity in performances and recordings. The new edition of the score used in this production corrects numerous previous errors.

No opera has been performed at Rossini in Wildbad as often as L'equivoco stravagante, so it was the perfect choice for the festival's 30th anniversary in 2018, being emblematic of the contribution the cultivation of Rossini in Germany has been able to make to the international Rossini revival. It is thanks to these efforts and the resulting domino effect that L'equivoco has attained its current, modest level of dissemination. The reason Rossini's first, two-act opera buffa was staged in Bad Wildbad from 1993 onwards was its very obscurity (the previous performance had been in Naples in 1974).

Recorded at the Königliches Kurtheater, Bad Wildbad, Germany, 26 and 29 July 2018