Verdi: Falstaff - Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (2021) [Blu-ray]

Falstaff was composed to a libretto fashioned by Arrigo Boito largely from Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor. Superficially the work is an opera buffa in its depiction of the travails of the penniless knight, Sir John Falstaff, but goes beyond the operatic tradition of the time. The vocal line is integrated into the orchestral texture, and with self-quotations and parodic elements, the opera is saturated with as much irony as comedy, forming the fitting culmination of Verdi’s entire operatic life. Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts this acclaimed staging of Verdi’s final masterpiece.

Recorded at Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, 23 November 2021

‘The new edition of Verdi’s Falstaff, staged the other night at the Teatro del Maggio, received an enthusiastic welcome and was followed by an endless line of applause that even prompted John Eliot Gardiner to repeat the final fugue... the proof of the protagonist Nicola Alaimo was formidable, an ideal Falstaff for the liveliness of the scenic game as well as for the variety of phrasing and the richness of expressive nuances but overall the rest of the company was well chosen...’ – La Nazione

‘Fun and applause for a “Falstaff” that Verdi would have liked. Verdi would have been satisfied: at the Falstaff on stage at the Teatro del Maggio, the new staging by director Sven-Eric Bechtolf, the audience not only pays joyful applause, but also has fun. First of all thanks to Nicola Alaimo, who is a formidable Falstaff, capable of holding the scene from the very last with lively and natural identification with the character, and of singing it with a well-sculpted voice and ductility of accents... But fundamental in this Falstaff is the conduction of John Eliot Gardiner, well followed by the Orchestra and the Choir of the Maggio...’ – Corriere Fiorentino

‘…Falstaff declamations were magnificently delivered by the baritone Nicola Alaimo: in the first act, the clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets joined with him in saluting his splendid belly…’ – The New York Times